The BPJ team is thrilled to announce that the 2020 title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series is Victoria C. Flanagan's Glossary of Unsaid Terms. Flanagan holds a dual-genre MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University. Their writing has appeared in New South, Crab Creek Review, and Blackbird, among other journals, and has been awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Emerging Poets Prize from Palette Poetry, and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship. They currently serve as the nonfiction editor at Anomaly.

In If the House, published in October by the University of Wisconsin Press, Molly Spencer makes clear how a home and its environs can serve as rich ground to explore the inner lives and intimacies of the people who dwell there. These poems give readers a chance to consider how our own lives have been molded by where we’ve planted ourselves and who or what surrounds us. 

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that final judge Patricia Smith has chosen Philip Metres’ “When It Rains in Gaza” as the winner of the 2019 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. Philip Metres has written ten books, including Sand Opera (2015), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), and the forthcoming Shrapnel Maps (2020). We’re grateful to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and to all who submitted poems for this year’s contest. Watch our website for details about the 2020 award.

The Fall 2019 issue includes “When It Rains in Gaza,” selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of this year’s Adrienne Rich Award, along with poems by finalists  Hillery Stone and  Jeff Tigchelaar and semifinalists Micah Bournes, K. Avvirin Gray, Éireann Lorsung, and Anna V. Q. Ross. Also featured is new work by Threa Almontaser, Daniel Arias-Gómez, Rebecca Aronson, Leila Chatti, George David Clark, Rebecca Cross, Allison Funk, Janlori Goldman, Eamon Grennan, J. Bailey Hutchinson, Donald Levering, Carolyn Oliver, Doug Ramspeck, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, Seth Simons, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, Gretchen Stengel, Jan Verberkmoes, G. C. Waldrep, Laura Paul Watson, and Jonathan Weinert.

Cover image by Holly Farrell.