Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. 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.
Series editor Patricia Smith serves as the judge for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. With the help of screeners, she awards to three authors publication in the series. This is the most significant award the press can offer: the opportunity for the author’s work to be published with all the dedication and expertise we have to offer. We provide professional copyediting by expert poetry editors, design and production by veteran designers who specialize in the typesetting of verse, and production managed by a house with a history of printing first-rate books. We believe this offers the poet the best possible opportunity to connect with his or her audience in print. This prize goes to all three books selected for the series. Three of the books are announced as finalists for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. One is further chosen as the winner of the prize and receives $5,000 in cash in addition to publication.
“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”
Shaina Phenix is the winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Her collection To Be Named Something Else will be published in Spring 2023. “So perfect to have Patricia Smith—whose work I look to for reflection, music, permission, communion, and sermon—be a catalyst for getting these poems out into the world,” said Phenix about the selection of her manuscript. “I am honored to know that the poets who precede me in this series have made the noise, taken the risks, stuck to their guns, and documented what might not otherwise be recorded. I know that my book is in good company.”
Phenix’s manuscript To Be Named Something Else may present like a mere collection of poems, but it is a cookout, a waiting room, a party, an abortion clinic, a hair-braiding shop, a church house, a bodega, a heaven, a nightclub restroom, a funeral, a cotillion, a birthing room. It is also a call-and-response where there is always a Black someone asking, a Black someone answering—and always centering a kind of coming-of-age and a kind of being for Black femmes in Harlem and other urban landscapes. They pull from and are in conversation with pop culture, oral histories as told by elders, hip-hop and R&B, spoken and overheard language, inherited and invented poem forms, and the spirit of Black Baptist tradition. But most importantly, these poems give voice to the echoes of so many female writers of color who have come before.
In addition to selecting Phenix’s To Be Named Something Else, Smith chose as finalists for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Jessica Poli’s manuscript Red Ocher and L.J. Sysko’s manuscript The Daughter of Men, both of which will also be published in the spring of 2023.
To submit a manuscript, click here.