top of page
2018 Peach Gold in Poetry
WITH GUEST JUDGE
MORGAN PARKER
Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. Her work has been featured in the The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New York Times, The Nation, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 NEA Literature Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. She co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series and is the co-founder of The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.
PHOTO: RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS
Winners
GOLD: KELLY X
SILVER: SASHA DEBEVEC-McKENNEY
BRONZE: SARA MAE
Shortlist
COLETTE ARRAND
GION DAVIS
HUSSAIN AHMED
INAM KANG
KELLY X
NATALIE WEE
SARA MAE
SASHA DEBEVEC-McKENNEY
Longlist
ANN WARD
COLETTE ARRAND
EMILY O'NEILL
GION DAVIS
HUSSAIN AHMED
INAM KANG
KELLY X
KEVIN BERTOLERO
LIZ BOWEN
MEGHANN BOLTZ
MILES A.M. COLLINS-SIBLEY
NATALIE WEE
S. ERIN BATISTE
SARA MAE
SASHA DEBEVEC-McKENNEY
TALIN TAHAJIAN
What I love about this poem is it's full, exciting, vernacular, exploratory, meandering, and strange. In fact, at first I wasn't sure what to make of it. But I'm excited about this poet's potential, and I respect this poem's playful ambition. What won me over was the way dissonant themes blurred and overlapped, as in: "I should beg God for forgiveness to get to heaven / so I can ask my dead dad his preexisting conditions;" the humor of "God’s on that Milky Way extra twee shit, of course" against the strange language of lines like "I’m both wretch and Jupiter-ruled" and "you awake to a neon / sign outside of the gate that says 'WE BUY GOLD.'"
-MORGAN PARKER
Because obviously. Because I am a sucker for reality show poems and anything concerning black women and desirability. And because of lines like "I can pretend to love anyone for the right reasons."
-MORGAN PARKER
I love the expert handling of language, playful word and syntax choices -- the poem is so controlled and sharp. Just some delicious lines throughout.
-MORGAN PARKER
bottom of page