We’re so pleased to announce that we have chosen a winner for the 2015 Hudson Prize. But that’s not all! We’ve also selected three Hudson Prize finalists for publication. A big, heartfelt congratulations goes to Gillian Cummings for winning the prize with her poetry manuscript My Dim Aviary. And we warmly welcome finalists Claudia Cortese, Jenny Irish, and Michelle Reed. Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2015 Hudson Prize!
Gillian Cummings’ poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, The Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Linebreak, The Massachusetts Review, The Paris-American, Quarterly West, in other journals and in the anthology Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke (Tupelo Press, 2013). She is the author of three chapbooks, Spirits of the Humid Cloud (dancing girl press, 2012), Petals as an Offering in Darkness, (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and Ophelia (dancing girl press, forthcoming, 2016). In 2008, she was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Memorial Fund Poetry Prize. A graduate of Stony Brook University (BA, English) and of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, Gillian lives in Westchester County, New York, where for five years she co-taught and taught poetry workshops to women at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She is also a visual artist.
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Claudia Cortese is the author of two chapbooks—Blood Medals (Thrush Poetry Press, 2015), a collection of prose poems, and The Red Essay and Other Histories (Horse Less Press, 2015), a book of lyric essays. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Mid-American Review, and Sixth Finch, among others. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in suburban Ohio and now lives in New Jersey, where she teaches at Montclair State University. Wasp Queen is her first full-length collection.
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Jenny Irish lives in Arizona, where she is lucky to work with young writers at Arizona State University. She has been previously published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Epoch, and other places. She has a good husband and a smart dog.
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Michelle S. Reed grew up in Michigan and completed a Master of Arts in English at Bucknell University. She lives with her husband and their little dog in Chicago, where she is working on her second manuscript.