The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce that Michael Mlekoday has been named a finalist for the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize by series editor Patricia Smith. Their manuscript All Earthly Bodies will be published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series in the spring of 2022. 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.
“Michael Mlekoday is savvy at the task at hand,” said Patricia Smith. “The poems in this book break intriguing new ground, each one rollicking with both their grasp of audience and their adroit handling of the line, the inflection, the resounding word. This is distinctly a people’s poetry, at once accessible and starkly original.”
Patricia Smith chose Casey Thayer as a finalist for his manuscript Rational Anthem and J. Bailey Hutchinson as winner of the prize for her manuscript Gut.
In All Earthly Bodies, Mlekoday sounds the depths—of ancestry and identity, race and gender, earth, death, and the self—to track the unbecoming and re-membering of the body. From inner-cities and cross-country bus rides to swamps and fern forests, these poems celebrate the ungentrifiable, ungovernable wildness of life. This is anarchist ecology, genderqueer environmentalism, an earthbound theology against empire in all of its forms. These poems ask: how might our lives and language, our prayers and politics, evolve if we really listen to the world and its more-than-human songs?
Michael Mlekoday lives in the Putah Creek watershed of California, where they teach classes on hip-hop, Gothic literature, and wilderness poetics. A National Poetry Slam Champion, Mlekoday was a founding editor at Button Poetry and currently serves as poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine. Their work has won the Florida Review Editors’ Prize, and recent poems appear in Third Coast, The Southampton Review, Sonora Review, Ninth Letter, Hunger Mountain, and The Rumpus. Their first book, The Dead Eat Everything, was chosen by Dorianne Laux as winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.