New Letters is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 New Letters Literary Awards. Winners
received a cash prize of $2,500 and will be published in the winter/spring 2023 issue of New Letters.
Alexia Arthurs photo by PJ Rountree
First Runner-Up: Felicia Zamora, “A Quadriptych: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility: Thoughts in cerebrum…”
Honorable Mention: Brittany Cavallaro, “Bloodless”
Jasmine Ledesma is a twenty-three-year-old writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in or is set to appear in places such as Crazyhorse, Rattle, and [PANK] among others. Her work has been nominated for Best of The Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was named a Brooklyn Poets fellow in 2021. Her novella Shrine was listed as a finalist for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Her poem was highly commended by Warsan Shire for the Moth Poetry Prize.
Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems: Deposition; Colosseum; Blood Lyrics; and If You Have to Go, all published by Graywolf Press. Blood Lyrics was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. International invitations to read and lecture include festivals in Tunis, Morocco, Oslo, and Stockholm. She completed graduate work in world religions, theology and poetry at Harvard University, and, following that, received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and the Norton Introduction to Literature. Since 2014 she has taught at the University of California, Riverside where she is a professor of creative writing and served as director of the MFA Program from 2015-18. She lives in South Pasadena with her young daughter, Maggie.
First Runner-Up: Alicia Ezekiel-Pipkin, “Run Like a Girl”
Honorable Mentions: Laura Joyce-Hubbard, “Flying Superman into Sarajevo,” & Jen Silverman, “Winter”
Joyce Dehli turned to writing creative nonfiction after a long career in journalism. As a 2016-2017 fellow-in-residence at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics, she began work on a series of linked personal essays. Her writing has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review and Hunger Mountain. She was a finalist for the 2019 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She enjoys living in Washington, D.C., but remains a Midwesterner at heart.
Dinty W. Moore is author of numerous books. How did that happen? Well, after brief, disastrous employment as a zookeeper, a modern dancer, a Greenwich Village waiter, a documentary filmmaker, and a wire service journalist, he had run out of other options. He has been published in Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and Utne Reader, among numerous other venues. Dinty lives just on the edge of Philadelphia. He is deathly afraid of polar bears.
First Runner-Up: Elizabeth Quirk, “The Intimacy of Longitude and Latitude”
Honorable Mention: Vickie Fang, “The Ghosts of Chang An”
Devon Ross is a writer and graduate student from Chicago, Illinois. She studied English and journalism at Arizona State University.
Alexia Arthurs grew up in Jamaica and New York. She is a graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She write stories about Jamaicans and is interested in the Jamaican diaspora and in Caribbean feminism. She published her first book, a collection of short stories, called How to Love a Jamaican in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2018. She is at work on a novel.
Camille Carter, Brittany Cavallaro, Meghan Dahn, Rebecca Faulkner, Ginger Harris,
Basil K. Hartwik, Mace Dent Johnson, Stephen Knauth, Tom Laichas, Rosa Lane, Jasmine Ledesma,
Danielle Lemay, Kelan Nee, Eileen Pettycrew, R. Rice, Hilary Sallick, Marty Saunders,
Sonya Schneider, Zoe Wilson,Felicia Zamora
Hope Coulter, Joyce Dehli, Karen Fischer, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, Jill Logan, Alicia Ezekiel-Pipkin,
Mary Peelen, Amelia Saint, A. Sandosharaj, Jen Silverman, Christina M. Wells, Sienna Zeilinger
Genevieve Abravanel, Celine Aenlle-Rocha, Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, Laura Demers,
Vickie Fang, Madeline Gaudin, Victor McConnell, Elizabeth Quirk, Devon Ross,
Pat Ryan, Michael Sarabi, Sarah Walker, Terry Watada
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