The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce that the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize has been awarded to Alison Thumel by series editor Patricia Smith. The poet will receive a $5,000 cash prize, and her manuscript Architect will be published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series in the spring of 2024. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
“I am so grateful to Patricia Smith for believing in this book that has come together through years of collecting bits and pieces, fragments and sketches” said Thumel about the selection of her manuscript. “I am honored to be included in the series and thankful to the University of Arkansas Press team for their openness, patience, and attention in bringing it to life.”
Smith calls this collection an “ingenious and heart-rending elegy.”
“Alison Thumel builds and rebuilds her lost brother; she mourns, examines, resurrects and loses him again and again, each time craving to find a body for him that might last. Although the grief in Architect may seem measured—locked in the poet’s tight but surprising approach to lyric—it is a take on grieving that’s wide-aloud, both contained and unleashed, resounding, and unforgettable.”
In addition to selecting Alison Thumel’s Architect, Smith chose three finalists for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, all of which will be published alongside the winner in spring 2024.
Jeremy Michael Clark’s manuscript The Trouble With Light chronicles the maddening intersecting of love and fear, resurrects the often overlooked, and wrestles with the emotional quandary of fatherhood. “In the midst of a country’s fervent undertaking to render the Black voice inconsequential to both its backdrop and its future, Jeremy Michael Clark’s insistence upon light is imperative and rebelliously fresh,” says Smith.
Navigating an ancestral path while repeated asking what language can offer the marginalized, Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology details themes of hybridity, illustrating how multiraciality and foreignhood come to be understood through a journey of self discovery. “A revelatory collection,” says Smith, who describes Keramati as a “Chinese Iranian poet who, with a deft eye and lush lines, tenaciously explores the weaving of a life so rarely hyphenated.”
In Wager, Adele Elise Williams describes the oppression of the female body with poems that feature womanhood and the perceived failures that often seek to undermine its empowerment. “You will not, under any circumstances, be able to resist reading every other single word of every other single poem aloud,” warns Smith, “relishing the rollick, the swiveling syntax, the familiar rendered oh-so-gloriously unfamiliar, the snap-crackle, the profound and the puckish.”
Alison Thumel is a writer from the Midwest. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA in poetry.
Jeremy Michael Clark’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Common, Poem-A-Day, The Southern Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. A former editorial assistant at Callaloo, his work has also been anthologized in Soul Sister Revue: A Poetry Compilation and Once A City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology. He has received support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
Saba Keramati is a Chinese Iranian writer from California. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, and The Margins, and it has been nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. She is also the winner of the 92NY Discovery Poetry Prize.
Hailing from various Southern places, Adele Elise Williams is coeditor of Bert Meyers: The Life and Work of An American Master. She is a doctoral candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, where she serves as the nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast.
Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press.