Conversation with Matthew Olzmann, Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner

Conversation with Matthew Olzmann, Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner

What was going through your head when you were writing the poems in the manuscript you submitted for the Poetry Prize? What were your inspirations and motivations?

The poems in Mezzanines were written over a six or seven-year period (with the majority of them being written during my last year in grad school and the year that followed). Until recently, I tended to write while thinking only about individual poems, rather than “collections” of poems. I wasn’t sure how they would fit together in a larger collection, or if they would go together in a book. That part came much later in the process. Once I had a substantial number of poems, I started organizing them and noticing thematic threads, figurative resonances, repetitions and obsessions. Turning that into a manuscript involved a long process of trial and error. Putting the poems in different orders. Discarding poems. Adding new poems. Seeing where the holes were and writing toward those spaces. The book that eventually became Mezzanines went through many evolutions. It existed with different titles, and dozens of poems shuffled their way in and out of its pages. I sent it to all the contests, and kept revising it. At some point, I decided to stop working on it and just let it exist for a while. I sent it out for a year without making any changes. After a year, I made some more revisions to it, but this time I was revising without having been staring at it everyday. Maybe that perspective–—that added distance—–helped. The manuscript found a home. Then I started revising it again.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a collection of (mostly) epistolary poems: letters, and poems about post offices. A lot of my poems use some element of direct address, or at least begin that way in early drafts, and this new collection leans into that mode more fully and consciously. I’m also working on some flash fiction and short lyric essays.

What advice do you have for writers looking to submit their manuscript?

Send to the presses that you truly love. You only get to publish this book once, so be patient, and find the press that’s the right fit for you and your work. If you’re thinking of submitting specifically to the Kundiman Prize, know that your work will be read with great care. The people who will be reading your work are rooting for you. A year or two after being selected for the Kundiman Prize, I had the opportunity to serve as a reader for the prize. Each manuscript was read by more than one reader, and careful attention was given to each. It can be daunting sending to contests, but know that there are people out there who are cheering for you.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books.  He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Kresge Arts Foundation.  His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in  Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Conversation with Janine Oshiro, Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner

Conversation with Janine Oshiro, Inaugural Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner

As we near the end of our submissions period for the Kundiman Poetry Prize (due March 15!), we asked previous winners what insight they have for future applicants looking to submit their manuscript.

Check out below what Janine Oshiro, whose book Pier won the 2010 Poetry Prize, had to say!

1) What was going through your head when you were writing the poems in the manuscript you submitted for the Poetry Prize? What were your inspirations and motivations?

In my poem "Duck Hunting," I make the command and ask the question, "Say it. How do I be inside of me?" This is the major preoccupation of the book. How do I exist in this body that will eventually die? How do I say goodbye to my mother, whose body is gone, but whose presence I still feel? And what joy can I find in the saying, in the making of poems? I was inspired by too many poets to name, poets I know through books and workshops, but two poets I was reading consistently when I worked on Pier were A.R. Ammons and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Their work continues to resonate with me and challenge me.

2) What are you working on now?

For many years now I have been working on some essays that may or may not grow into something bigger and less essay-like. I still feel uncertain about what I'm doing with these particular chunks of words, but I'm devoted to the work and seeing what may come of it.

3) What advice do you have for writers looking to submit their manuscript?

It took me a long time to start thinking of my poems as a manuscript. I think other people saw the potential for a collection before I did and helped me to conceive of it as a book. I was just focused on one poem, the poem that was in front of me. I really needed other people to help me see the work as a whole. Cultivating writing friendships and being open to change and play with the manuscript is key.

Janine Oshiro is the author of Pier, winner of the 2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize, published by Alice James Books. She has been awarded the 2011 Elliot Cades Award for Literature in Hawaiʻi and the 2013 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in Hawaiʻi, where she is currently studying massage therapy.

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A Conversation with Rajiv Mohabir, Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner

A Conversation with Rajiv Mohabir, Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner 

As we near the end of our submissions period for the Kundiman Poetry Prize (due March 15!), we asked previous winners what insight they have for future applicants looking to submit their manuscript.

Check out below what Rajiv Mohabir, whose book The Cowherd's Son was the winner of our 2015 Poetry Prize, had to say!

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1) What was going through your head when you were writing the poems in the manuscript you submitted for the Poetry Prize? What were your inspirations and motivations?

I wrote the majority of the poems in The Cowherd’s Son while putting together The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books), my first book. The poems in The Cowherd’s Son focus on the religious and mythological traditions that I have inherited as a second generation Indo-Caribbean. A patchwork of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian shape the tone of this collection.

I was inspired by my Aji’s songs and stories. My poems are a kind of translation of her poetic. I attempt to cycle her songs again but from my own particular generation and idiom. I am inspired by the poems of Bhojpuri folk music, Kabir, Mirabai, Sudesh Mishra, and Rooplal Monar. American poets like Roger Sedarat, Agha Shahid Ali, Craig Santos Perez, Eduardo C. Corral, Rigoberto González, and so many others also inflect my craft decisions and my lyric impulses.

When it came to putting the manuscript together, it was Oliver de la Paz at the 2013 Kundiman retreat who told me to pull out the poems about mythology from my taxidermy poems. I couldn’t just abandon this clutch that sung of the coolie diaspora—I still felt them move me. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke sat with me on the floor of Sinclair Library at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa and together we stitched the poems together.

2) What are you working on now?

Right now I am working on two book manuscripts. The first is a collection of poems I call “chutney poems.” I kind of invent a formal poem based on the structure of a syncretic form of Indo-Caribbean dance/folk music to pay tribute to the oral traditions that I come from. The language is filled with triple entendre play and recklessness, crackling in and out of Guyanese Creole, Bhojpuri, and English.

My second manuscript is a memoir that I’ve tentatively titled “Antiman” that centers my transition from Orlando, Florida to Varanasi, India to New York City—together about a seven year span from when I worked as a teacher in the NYC Department of Education to when I did my MFA at Queens College. In it I write about my experiences with going to India for the first time since my ancestors left over 120 years ago, my encounters with Indo-Caribbean music, and navigating familial space as a queer.

3) What advice do you have for writers looking to submit their manuscript?

My advice to writers who are working at their first collections, is to write through rejections. Rejections are hard—still, revise and resubmit. Transform every last rejection you get into determination to edit, to push yourself harder. Keep going, reading along the way. You will learn all kinds of things about yourself along the way. The publishing world is 89% white. It’s an industry clearly stacked against writers of color, queer and trans writers, disabled writers, writers with “complicated” (read non-cisheteropatriarchal “able-bodied”) identities, etc.

Also, you are not alone. So many people say that to be a writer is to be alone. There are other writers out there who are struggling as you are. Find them. Share your work. Be open to hearing critiques. Share your favorite books. Kundiman is proof that a community can feed you along this path. Again, you are not alone.

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Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Taxidermist's Cut (Four Way Books, winner of the Intro to Poetry Prize) and The Cowherd's Son. Read more about him at www.rajivmohabir.com.

Congratulations to the 2016 Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner!

Tupelo Press and Kundiman are delighted to make the joint announcement that Tupelo Press Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Levine and Poetry Editor Cassandra Cleghorn have selected Sharon Wang of Ridgewood, New York, as winner of the 2016 Kundiman Poetry Prize for her manuscript, The Republic of Mercy.

Sharon Wang's poems have appeared in journals including Blackbird, Omniverse, The Volta, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is a poet and software engineer living in New York City.

Cassandra Cleghorn and Jeffrey Levine on The Republic of Mercy:

This is a startling, ambitious debut. In Sharon Wang's thrilling and corporeal geometry, touch dominates, if often in its "aftermarks": singes, whiffs, folds of fabric, echoing gestures between bodies. A sureness of craft and extraordinary control of tone enable Wang to move through a range of lyric personae, always believable, never reducible, by turns modest ("here move slowly we are not practiced"), speculative, heart-broken, ecstatic, even giddy with vaulting dreams ("But who wouldn't want to be the sun"). With generous language and quicksilver intelligence, Wang expresses "a hunger so large it stops the mouth." In Wang's hands abstractions beget the world; the poems describe what is "hard and brilliant," the spaces between objects, and what's left in the wake of losses. But despite its attunement both to elegy and to witness, the mode is praise: "He loved the world. He loved it suddenly / and without reason." Like the book's favorite flower, the aster, Wang's poems contain something that threads inside them, "asking them to open, shut, live." And live they do. As the poet works to understand, "If in fact it wasn't possible to build/ the world anew," she does build –– extravagantly, judiciously, lovingly. The result is a book of radiant integrity.

Sharon Wang receives a $1,000 cash prize, publication by Tupelo Press, and national distribution.

Heartfelt congratulations to the following distinguished finalists:

Bird of the Indian Subcontinent by Subhashini Kaligotla, A Lesser Love by EJ Koh, Goddess of Democracy: An Occupy Lyric by Henry Wei Leung, When I See You Again, It Will Be With a Different Face by Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Bridled by Amy Meng, So Far by Laurel Akemi Nakanishi, Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater by Sam Roxas-Chua, The Secret Lives of Misspelled Cities by Zohra Saed, and Welcome Home, Spaceboy! by Armin Tolentino.

This marks the second year of the new partnership between Tupelo Press, a nonprofit, independent literary press, and Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American literature. Tupelo Press selects the winner of the annual Kundiman Poetry Prize from among a group of finalists chosen by Kundiman's artistic board. Now in its 7th year, the Kundiman Poetry Prize ensures the annual publication of a book by an Asian American poet. The award is open to self-identified Asian American poets at any stage in their careers.

Congratulations to the winner of the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize!

Congratulations to Rajiv Mohabir, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Tupelo Press Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Levine and Associate Poetry Editor Cassandra Cleghorn have selected Rajiv Mohabir as winner of the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize for his manuscript, The Cowherd's Son.

The winner receives a $1,000 cash prize, publication by Tupelo Press, and national distribution.

Winner of 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award and the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Spring 2016), and recipient of a PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant, Rajiv Mohabir received fellowships from Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His poetry and translations are internationally published or forthcoming from journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Quarterly West, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Anti-, Great River Review, PANK, *and Aufgabe. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the *Ozone Park Literary Journal. Currently he is pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i, where he teaches poetry and composition.

The finalists were Radio Tower by Naoko Fujimoto, Cyclorama by Annie Kim, Child of Shame by EJ Koh, Goddess of Democracy by Henry Wei Leung, Autumn Troupe by Miho Nonaka, Tula by Chris Santiago, As Though We Are One by Alexandrine Vo, Republic of Mercy by Sharon Wang, and Overpour by Jane Wong.

Congratulations to the winner and finalists!

Now in its 6th year, the Kundiman Poetry Prize ensures the annual publication of a book by an Asian American poet. The award is open to self-identified Asian American poets at any stage in their careers. For more about the Kundiman Poetry Prize, please visit kundiman.org/prize.

Kundiman Poetry Prize Has a New Publisher

Press Release Contact: info@kundiman.org

The Kundiman Poetry Prize has a new publisher

New York, NY—Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American writing, has partnered with Tupelo Press as the new book publisher of The Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Tupelo Press, which published their first five titles in 2001, is a literary press devoted to discovering and publishing works of poetry, literary fiction, and creative nonfiction by emerging and established writers. An ideal partner for Kundiman, Tupelo Press not only publishes aesthetically pleasing books, but they place high regard on excellent writing and diversity, seeking works with “a blend of language, imagination, distinctiveness, and craft.”

Now in its 6th year, the Kundiman Poetry Prize ensures the annual publication of a book by an Asian American poet. The award is open to self-identified Asian American poets at any stage in their careers. Winner also receives $1,000.

Full-length manuscript entries are accepted through the online entry system from February 1 to March 15, 2015. For complete entry guidelines, please visit: http://kundiman.org/prize/

Congratulations to Janine Joseph, winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize for her manuscript "Driving Without a License"

Congratulations to Janine Joseph, winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize. The Alice James Books Board along with members of the Kundiman artistic staff selected her manuscript Driving Without a License. Along with book publication, Janine will also receive $1,000.

Janine Joseph holds an MFA from New York University and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, an Inprint/Barthelme Fellowship in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets prize, she is an Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.

The 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize finalists were: Purge by Michelle Chan Brown, Recombinant by Ching-In Chen, Love the Stranger by Jay Deshpande, quiet of chorus by Vanessa Huang, seconds of needless animal terror by Esther Lee, Cutlish by Rajiv Mohabir, The Space Between by Alison Roh Park, Tula by Chris Santiago, and Overpour by Jane Wong.

Congratulations to the winner and finalists!

The 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize: Last Call for Submissions! Deadline 3/15

The Kundiman Poetry Prize

Published by Alice James Books 
an affiliate of The University of Maine at Farmington

Deadline for submission:
March 15, 2014

The Kundiman Poetry Prize is dedicated to publishing exceptional work by Asian American poets. Winner receives $1,000 and book publication with Alice James Books.

Submit now! 

For more information, visit our prize page here: www.kundiman.org/prize

And to submit electronically, click here: https://kundiman.submittable.com/submit/26452

Alice James Books

Alice James Books is a cooperative poetry press with a mission is to seek out and publish the best contemporary poetry by both established and beginning poets, with particular emphasis on involving poets in the publishing process.

Eligibility

Asian American writers living in the United States.

General Guidelines

• Reading period begins January 15.

• Manuscripts must be typed, paginated, and 50 – 70 pages in length (single spaced).

• Individual poems from the manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, anthologies, or chapbooks of less than 25 pages, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished. Translations and self-published books are not eligible. No multi-authored collections, please.

• Manuscripts must have a table of contents and include a list of acknowledgments for poems previously published. The inclusion of a biographical note is optional. Your name, mailing address, email address and phone number should appear on the title page of your manuscript. 

• No illustrations, photographs or images should be included.

• The Kundiman Poetry Prize is judged by consensus of the members of Kundiman's Artistic Staff and the Alice James Books Editorial Board. Manuscripts are not read anonymously. Learn more about our judging process.

• Winners will be announced in June.

Guidelines for Electronic Manuscript Submission

Click here to access the Electronic Submission Application between January 15 and March 15.

Guidelines for Print
Manuscript Submission

Should you wish to submit your manuscript via postal mail, mail your entry to:

Kundiman
P.O. Box 4248
Sunnyside, NY 11104

Send one copy of your manuscript submission with two copies of the title page. Use only binder clips. No staples, folders, or printer-bound copies.

MANUSCRIPTS CANNOT BE RETURNED. Please do not send us your only copy.

Entry fee is $28.  Checks or money orders should be made out to Alice James Books. On the memo line of your check, writeThe Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Checklist for print manuscript entry:

• One (1) copy of manuscript enclosed, with acknowledgements and two (2) copies of title page
• $28 entry fee
• Business sized SASE
• Stamped addressed postcard
• Postmarked between January 15
  and March 15

Congratulations to Lo Kwa Mei-en, Winner of the 2013 Kundiman Poetry Prize!

 2013 Kundiman Poetry Prize Announcement

Congratulations to Lo Kwa Mei-en, winner of the 2013 Kundiman Poetry Prize. The Alice James Books Board along with members of the Kundiman Board selected her manuscript, “Yearling.” Along with book publication, she will also receive $1,000 and a feature reading in New York City. 

Lo Kwa Mei-en's poems have appeared in Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals. She earned her MFA from Ohio State University and continues to live and work in Columbus, Ohio.

The 2013 Kundiman Poetry Prize finalists were: Awake, Location by Mary-Kim Arnold, The Cumulus Effect by J. Mae Barizo, Extended Stay by Janine Joseph, This is How the Bones Sings by W. Todd Kaneko, Day of Clean Brightness by Jane Lin, In the Quiet After by Mia Malhotra, and Autumn Troupe by Miho Nonaka

Congratulations to the winner and finalists!