Meg Kearney of NH has won the 2020 Washington Prize for her manuscript All Morning the Crows.
Cleopatra Mathis says the book “goes well beyond a metaphoric treatment of birds and their habits. Instead, their differing characteristics comprise a jumping-off point for a mythology of selfhood—a lens through which to examine and confront a personal history. The catalog of birds illustrates how happenstance and speculation determine who she is. Untranslatable and mysterious as any mythology, a various history of a changeable self accumulates in these inventive, charged, and often ecstatic poems.”
Meg Kearney is author of two full-length collections of poems for adults, An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; as well as a heroic crown published as a chapbook titled The Ice Storm and a trilogy of novels in verse for teens. She directs the Solstice MFA Program in Massachusetts.
The Washington Prize has been awarded annually since 1987 to a full-length poetry collection by an American or Canadian author. The winner receives publication and $1500. Past winners include Fred Marchant, Enid Shomer, Jay Rogoff, Frannie Lindsay, Annie Kim, and many others.