2024 Prize for Poetry Winners
We are pleased to announce that the 2024 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, with an honorarium of $1,000, is awarded to:
Story Rhinehart
Shaker Heights, Ohio
for her poem
“The Day I Met St. Michael Sitting on the Steps of the Cuyahoga County Court House in Cleveland, Ohio”
Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200, are awarded to:
Shutta Crum
Ann Arbor, Michigan
for her poems “Gathering You” and “What I Bring to the Asking”
Loss Pequeño Glazier
Franklin, North Carolina
for his poem “The Blue Feet of Bees”
Justin Hunt
Charlotte, North Carolina
for his poem “Origin Story”
Final judge for the 2024 Prize was poet Sun Yung Shin.
Read the winning poems below.
The 2024 Robinson JeffeRs Prize for Poetry Winning Poem
The Day I Met St. Michael Sitting on the Steps of the Cuyahoga County Court House in Cleveland, Ohio
He was perched like The Thinker & he looked
out of place with his armor & his wings.
He is the saint you invoke if you want to know
the truth, so, naturally I had some questions.
He told me the secret to not burning the second
piece of toast. He listened while I asked him
how to discipline your daughters without being
too harsh or too wimpy. He taught me the equation
for “how to love yourself” even when x doesn’t equal
y & when x will never equal y when y is your
husband’s expectations. He gave me a tattered, leather
bound book titled How to Forgive God When You Keep
Getting Cancer. We discussed how to forgive our friends
when we feel they’ve abandoned us but honestly, I can’t
remember his answer to that one. He took a stone & scratched
a chart into the courthouse step showing just how to find the time
to walk your dog every day. I wish I’d asked him how you find
the time to make art & make money. I asked him how you lose
weight when you’re on Tamoxifen. (You don’t.) I asked him
how you keep your house clean when you’re working,
making art, rehearsing, driving your kids to music lessons
& soccer practice & acting class & driving yourself
to doctors’ appointments & Cancer treatments… (You don’t.)
He leaned back, took a drag on his joint & his feathers
started to blow off one by one in the wind & he started
to disappear but it wasn’t like he was disappearing
as much as it was like he was becoming un-drawn but before
he was completely un-drawn he handed me a mirror,
tiny & framed with thick waves of plaster & painted
bright yellow with glittery shells pressed
into it, the kind of thing your child would bring home
from kindergarten for Mother’s Day & when I
looked at it I realized it was exactly the mirror you need
when all the other mirrors reflect what the world sees
& not how you dream of seeing yourself.
Story Rhinehart
Story Rhinehart is a writer, choreographer and artist . Story’s choreography and visual art pieces are frequently inspired by poetry. Her poem “Night Light” was chosen to be part of the staged reading “The Gift of Darkness” presented by Literary Cleveland as part of the Cleveland Humanities Festival in April 2024. Story has been published in The Caribbean Writer. She has choreographed dance works for Cleveland Public Theatre, The Cleveland Playhouse FUSIONFEST, Cleveland Arts Prize Goes Live at SPACES Gallery, The Cleveland Museum of Art and ChamberFest Cleveland. Her visual art has been on display at The Cleveland Museum of Art, Lakeland Community College and Waterloo Arts. In 2023 she collaborated with playwright, Eric Coble, poet, Raja Belle Freeman and participants to create the Greek Chorus for Art Acts’ and ARTFUL’s community devise theatre piece This Art is for the Birds. She is currently collaborating on the Greek Chorus and creating choreography for Batrachomyomachia: The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice: A Tiny Homeric Epic also for Art Acts and ARTFUL. The piece will premiere at the Brownhoist Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio, in late August 2024. Story is a graduate of Wesleyan University. She lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with her husband, her two daughters, and their dog, Banton.
2024 Honorable Mentions
Gathering You
~ on learning that there is sound in a black hole
the sunlit square
in your hospital room frames me
as I watch you giving up
unable to speak
still, I listen
knowing the sounds of the universe
vibrate through you in shapely waves
unstoppable
from the center of black holes
from the ocean’s abyssal zone
from the cells in your body multiplying
nothing, and no one, is voiceless
not even you, here, dying
soundwaves push
through your heart, your lungs, your bones
gathering, as they touch you more intimately
than I ever could, taking you
breaking you
sometimes into frequencies difficult to hear
as I, in the afternoon light,
am buffeted by the waves of sound
your silence speaks.
What I Bring to the Asking
--don’t despair of this falling world, not yet
didn’t it give you the asking
Jane Hirshfield: Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me
it doesn’t weigh much
a modest bundle of breath
which i carry like a vagabond
i’ve drawn twine through each why?
and rested it on memory’s shoulder
each day a balance of questioning
of walking with one hand open
a penitent, risen from her knees
and come through to the asking
some days what I carry is heavier
and see—here in my hand—lies a simple ask
it’s wanting attention
it’s what I bring
Shutta Crum
Shutta Crum’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in many journals including Nostos, Acumen, Calyx, Boulevard and Mom Egg Review. She is a Pushcart nominee and the author of three chapbooks. When You Get Here (Kelsay Books) won a gold Royal Palm Literary Award (FL). She’s also authored eighteen books for young readers, including Thunder-Boomer! a Smithsonian Magazine and American Library Association notable book of the year. In addition, she writes regularly for the Florida State Poetry Association and the Florida Writers Association, and she publishes the monthly newsletter The Wordsmith’s Playground. More info: www.shutta.com.
The Blue Feet of Bees
The rich sweetness of the Appalachian blackberry,
now fully ripe, is not found in the fruit but flows from
the bees, the hum, made sweet in the complete cycle
emanating from an elusive, subtle mountain aroma.
Just as Shunryu is a direct lineage to Dogen,
one thought actualized. It’s a single udumbara.
As heart is an organ with neurons. In effect, and
literally, kokoro is “mind.” Heart-spirit and organ.
Spirit and Ki, “place of arrival.” Where you now
are. Climbing the steps and passing the ki nook
where a dew-rinsed fawn lingers. Emerging
at night, a spirit scent, to relish the garden.
Nearly a speck in front of a massive pinnacle
of metamorphosed dolomite, her tiny figure
wobbles woven of opaque foliate vibrations.
In the morning, her spots sometimes flicker
in the shadows of the laurel arbor, vibrating
otoacoustics and spectra no human can see.
All parts of the cycle connect to other parts.
All plants enter inside you when you inhale.
Then, exhaling, you enter them. All being in-
side and outside you. We’re not what we think.
We are almost entirely water, bacteria, dust,
ecosystems inscribed inside ecologies, eco-
aggregates, elements, star particles, aquatica,
actual breath lasting only for the time being.
I sing elisions of my cells and archaic nebulae.
I wander long across endless astral immensities.
I follow the River of Stars, the thousand-aster
Beehive Cluster beating in Cancer’s heart, pollen
of nebulae, clouds of fish so tiny they are breath
itself, sea fans, kelp, sculptured coral reef atolls.
I linger in impeccable orientation. The radiant
sight of orange stripes on vivid vibrating thoraxes,
the sway of sepal, petal, stamen, the fourth whorl.
I swoon under the magnetic ripples, curled calyx,
corollas, erect androecium, gyrating gynoecium.
Clusters of epiphoric stars, paired suns, comet
orbit. Caesura of Cassiopeia blooms. Pitless
fruit from a single flower with one sole ovary.
I feel the feet of bees on my cool blue-white face.
Minute shoeprints of their dexterous tarsal claws.
The bee’s soft feet tender on fleshy blue buzz.
The difference is notable in blackberry honey.
Loss Pequeño Glazier; Photo Credit Francis Oliva Leon
Poet Loss Pequeño Glazier, Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Buffalo, has spent a lifetime writing and traveling, including sojourns in West Texas, Berkeley, Paris, Kathmandu, Havana, and Buffalo. Works include Transparent Mountain: Ecopoetry from the Great Smokies (Night Horn Books, 2022), Luna Lunera: Poems al-Andalus(Night Horn Books, 2020), Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt, 2003), Digital Poetics: the Making of E-Poetries (University of Alabama Press, 2002), and his work-in-progress, Ten Thousand Trees: the House Above Bartram’s River. The much acclaimed Digital Poetics is held by over a thousand libraries worldwide. Published in over 100 literary magazines and anthologies, Glazier has served as Electronic Poetry Center director and international e-poetry festival organizer, and is the creator of landmark historic digital works (EPC 1994-2024), accessible via his UPenn-EPC author page (lpglazier.com). An avid observer of the natural world, Glazier's roots are in Latino, multicultural, and mountain cultures. He lives and writes in the astonishing biodiversity of the southern Appalachians.
Origin Story
We are who we are
say the ghosts of bison
say the whisperers of short-grass
and cottonwoods
say the Comanche
Kiowa and Cheyenne
We are who we are
say the bullheads
flatheads and bass
say the Chikaskia’s sandy banks
We are who we are
say the locusts
from sand-plum gnarls
the battered branches of settlers’ elms
We are who we are
say the Whites
who stole this land-sea
its lean-to-wind gods
their constant roar
We are who we are
say your forebears’ bones
their proved-up claim
the broken sod
We are who we are
say your father’s
sun-whipped eyes
his thick get-it-done hands
You
are who you are
say your lungs
say these empty endless roads
your dusty flatland feet
Justin Hunt
Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. Fluent in German and Spanish, his poetry has won several awards, most recently 1st place in the Live Canon International Poetry (U.K.) and Porter Fleming Literary competitions, 2nd place in the River Styx and Strokestown (Ireland) contests, and honorable mentions and commendations from such journals and organizations as New Ohio Review, New Letters and the Munster Literature Centre. Hunt’s work also appears in Barrow Street, Five Points, Harpur Palate, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Terrain.org, Four Way Review and The Florida Review, among others. He is currently assembling a debut poetry collection. For more information, visit justinhunt.online.