Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize

Winner of the inaugural Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize, Cameron Barnett's debut The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water, explores the complexity of race and the body for a black man in today's America.

In hybrid narrative prose poems, In the Antarctic Circle follows two characters as they weave a life among the frigid, white landscape of the southern continent. This is not the Antarctic of polar expeditions or scientific discovery. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves at the end of the world. Harpoons, escape plans, seal meat, and endless ice populate this world of distant Antarctic coordinates. Where pages are intentionally left blank, something new emerges: the fullness of emptiness, the frightening textures of snow on a continent that is filled to the brim with it.

In The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize, Eric Tran contends with the aftermath of a close friend's suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities and joys of being a gay man of color. At the intersection of queerness, loss, and desire, Tran uses current events, such as the Pulse nightclub tragedy, pop culture references, and comic book allusions to create a unique and textured poetry debut. He employs an unexpected pairing of prayer and fantasy allowing readers to imagine a world of queer joy and explore how grief can feel otherworldly. This stunning debut contains multitudes.

Luxury, Blue Lace by S. Brook Corfman, winner of the Rising Writer Prize, takes the reader through this complicated experience of selfhood and its multitudes, exploring the many overlapping identities a single person can contain. Corfman's poems conjure a host of identities and selves both living and dead, gesturing towards the complex way memory and loss can inhabit us. Formed by experience, history, and the strictures of gender, the poems dwell on the challenges of fully knowing and understanding the diverse parts of a subject. While they seek out a full form for the individual, they also relish the complex multiplicity of the identities that arise through self-exploration and self-knowledge.

Set in a vaguely dystopian, yet also realistic, Mexico City-endless traffic jams, relentless clouds of pollution, economic hardships, and the ever-present threat of drug cartels, Myth of Pterygium, the debut novella by Diego Gerard Morrison is the story of a struggling poet contending with vision loss, poverty, and what it means to be an arms dealer in Mexico City. The unnamed narrator of the book, at times referred to as Arthur-in part because of the growing similarity of his life with Arthur Rimbaud's-struggles with the dissonance of leading an artistic life while providing for his family. A failed, penniless poet with a child on the way, he is forced to take a job in his family's weapons dealing enterprise, which he soon discovers is connected to the corrupt Mexican armed forces and drug cartels, who are responsible for the increasing death toll in the country. All the while, the narrator struggles with a growing condition in his right eye, a pterygium, that is slowly taking over his vision, blurring the events of his life, including his wife's complicated pregnancy, extortions by the drug cartels, and his own relationship to his writing.