Sundog Poetry Book Award
The Sundog Poetry Book Award is on hiatus for 1 year.
Please check back in 2025 for updates on the next award offering.
Julia C. Alter | photo: Karen Pike
2023 Winner
Julia C. Alter for Some Dark Familiar
“I was drawn to this book for its singular voice and remarkable tonal control. Each poem has an intensity and a sense of risk that makes the stakes immediately feel palpable and real. Some Dark Familiar is filled with poems that are hard to turn away from, and the feeling it evokes lingers long after each reading.“
-Matthew Olzmann, Final Judge
Runners Up
Ben Aleshire for Poems for Bystanders
Partridge Boswell for Ensō Carousel
2023 Book Award Finalists
Ben Aleshire
Eve Alexandra
Julia Alter
Partridge Boswell
Michael Carter
Darren Higgins
Raymond Hudson
Karina Jutzi
Carlene Kucharczyk
Taylor Mardis Katz
Hatsy McGraw
Abby Paige
Mark Rubin
2023 Final Judge: Matthew Olzmann
Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Past Year Winners
2022
Bethany Breitland for Fire Index
Selected by Shanta Lee
Winner of the 2022 Sundog Poetry Book Award
Fire Index measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion. Told in fragments, using hybrid and persona, Breitland confronts the trauma of her brother’s death, her father’s abuse, and the complicated relationships to her sister, mother, and womanhood. She reckons with her complicit, and often dishonest life, and how walking out from the burning construct demands her full attention, forgiveness, responsibility.
2021
Michael Fleming for Bags & Tools
Selected by Vievee Francis
Recent winner of the Sundog Poetry Book Award, selected by Vievee Francis in 2021
This collection of poems by Michael Fleming was selected as the finalist in the 2021 Sundog Poetry Book Award by poet Vievee Francis. The book has been published by Green Writers Press.
Michael Fleming was born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, and has lived and learned and worked all around the world, from Thailand, England, and Swaziland to Berkeley, New York City, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. He’s been a teacher, a grad student, a carpenter, and always a writer; for the past fifteen years he has edited literary anthologies for W. W. Norton. (You can see some of Fleming’s own writing at: www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws )
2020
Lucas Farrell for the blue-collar sun
Selected by Mary Ruefle
the blue-collar sun by Lucas Farrell of Townshend, Vermont. The winner of the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award for a 1st or 2nd manuscript by a Vermont-based poet, selected by final judge, Mary Ruefle. Cover art by Emily Mason.