Molly McCully Brown to judge 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize

Hub City Press is pleased to announce the judge for the biennial New Southern Voices Book Prize. The contest will award $1,000 and publication to the winner and be judged by poet Molly McCully Brown. Submissions open on January 1, 2023.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017, and the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020), which was named one of Kirkus’s top titles of 2020. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). 

Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, The New York Times and elsewhere. The Recipient of a United States Artists fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellowship, and the 2018-2019 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, she lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she teaches in the MFA program at Old Dominion University.

The New Southern Voices Poetry Prize is open to poets who have either never published a full-length collection of poetry, or who have only published one full-length collection. Entrants must currently reside in and have had residency in one or more of the following states for a minimum of 24 consecutive months: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. (Residency will be verified before prizewinner is announced.)

Manuscripts should be between 48-120 pages for this contest. Submissions will be taken through online submission only. All manuscripts will be read anonymously by first-level judges and eight finalists will be submitted to Molly McCully Brown, who will select the winner and runner-up. This contest is guided by the CLMP Code of Ethics.

FULL PRIZE GUIDELINES

Previous winners of the New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize include: Thresh & Hold, Marlanda Dekine (2022); Mustard, Milk and Gin by Megan Denton Ray (2020); Rodeo in Reverse by Lindsey Alexander (2018); Wedding Pulls by J.K. Daniels (2016); and Pantry by Lilah Hegnauer (2014). Hub City Press will publish the winning book in 2024.