Gut: Poems by J. Bailey Hutchinson, is now available!

J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut, winner of the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller. In Hutchinson’s poems, which explore the substance of personal history, family attains the mysterious stature of folklore, while the vast worlds of nature and of the imagination abound with extraordinary creatures that likewise elude full understanding. For the voracious consciousness at work here, inheritance—what it means to be from a particular place and a particular people, no matter how one might strain against that—lies at the very heart of things.

“I couldn’t be more energized and excited knowing that J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the first winning manuscript in my tenure as the Miller Williams series editor,” wrote series editor Patricia Smith. “In addition to snagging first place, Gut also grabs the honor for the most appropriate manuscript title ever—because the gut is exactly where this book hits, relentlessly, poem after poem, page after page. Here is family attending to its family business, its love, its suspicions, and its fears under an insisting sun or a cold and tenacious moon. Here is the thunderous Mississippi River coursing through it all, scrubbing some things blameless, washing away others. Here is bold southern sensibility, rapturous and addictive, crafting poems that are impossible to turn away from. Bailey touts a smoldering command of her slice of the world, and her astute ability to recreate all the delightful nuances of that world is fully at work in this winning book.”

J. Bailey Hutchinson is from Memphis, Tennessee. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where she served as assistant director of the Open Mouth Literary Center. She is an associate editor at Milkweed Editions, and her work can be found in Muzzle Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Ninth Letter, among other publications. She lives in Minneapolis.