UNT Rilke Prize

Kevin Prufer at podium

2023 UNT Rilke Prize

Chris Abani's Smoking the Bible (Copper Canyon Press) has won the 2023 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. Abani will be present for two events: a Q&A on October 4th, 2023, at 6:30 PM in University Union 339 and a reading and book signing on October 5th, 2023, at 8:00 PM in University Union 382.

In his most recent collection, Smoking the Bible, Chris Abani memorializes--through the imaginative journey that poems so often take--a brother who has been given the diagnosis of "Terminal." Alongside this commitment to elegize a loved one is a second voyage. Often in brief portraits, poems diminutive as carved cameos, Abani writes of migrations to new countries and continents, of leaving behind a homeland that is both "wound and suture," a lost landscape whose "persistent aftertaste" follows the speaker everywhere he goes. Smoking the Bible is a book intent on understanding nostalgia, a word that burns with pain and grief, but one that also suggests the "flutter of release." Evocative, rich with sensory detail, Abani's poems transport the reader from Nigeria to America's Midwest, ranging between memory, dream, and revelatory vision. At its heart, Smoking the Bible worries about acts of translation, how difficult it is to translate languages and cultures. And, beyond that, how we struggle to translate the past into present. "I promise / to walk with you as far as I can," the speaker tells his dying brother, the space between death and the living the most difficult translation of all.

Click here for press flyer.

2022 UNT Rilke Prize

Valzhyna Mort's Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has won the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision.

Songs of grieving, memory, and witness lie at the center of Valzhyna Mort's latest collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, a book that makes vivid and palpable the upended history of Belarus, a country filled with "forests / of the unburied dead" and tanks driving through the streets. "The empire fell, then snow fell," Mort writes in "Self-Portrait with Madonna on Pravda Avenue," pravda meaning truth, a Russian word that, under Soviet rule implied propaganda, disinformation, and the suppression of free speech. Here, the poet reclaims the word. She restores truth in lines informed by historical insight--invasions and wars, exile, the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl--and by a biting humor so characteristic of the region. "What has kept us alive?" a speaker asks. "Our death songs" is the dry answer. Mort's poems enact both an elegy and an affirmation that survival is possible, that tongues can go on speaking, "tied with a black ribbon of verse."

Photos from our October 2022 UNT Rilke Prize events:

Click here for press flyer.

Author photo: Tanya Kapitonava

More Winners

Kiki Petrosino
White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia
2021

http://www.kikipetrosino.com/home/

Kathleen Graber
The River Twice
2020

David Keplinger
Another City
2019

Click here for a feature about David Keplinger and the UNT Rilke Prize on KERA's Art&Seek.
Click here for an audio file of David Keplinger's campus reading on April 4, 2019.
http://www.davidkeplingerpoetry.com/

Allison Benis White
Please Bury Me in This
2018

Click here for a feature on KERA's Art & Seek about Allison Benis White and the UNT Rilke Prize.
Click here for an audio file of Allison's campus reading on April 12, 2018.
http://www.allisonbeniswhite.com/

Wayne Miller
Post-
2017

Click here to listen to an audio file of Wayne's campus reading on April 13, 2017.
http://onlythesenses.com/wordpress/

Rick Barot
Chord
2016

Click here for a feature on KERA's Art & Seek!
Click here for an audio file of Rick's campus reading on April 14, 2016.
Click here for an interview from American Literary Review.
https://www.rickbarot.com/

Mark Wunderlich
The Earth Avails
2015 Mark Wunderllich

Click here for more information about our 2015 winner.
Click here for KERA radio feature by Jerome Weeks
Click Here for an American Literary Review interview with Mark Wunderlich.
https://www.markwunderlich.com/

Katie Peterson
The Accounts
2014

Click here for more information about 2014 winner.
Click here for Katie's campus reading on April 8, 2014.
Click here for an interview and radio piece by Jerome Weeks.
https://www.katiepeterson.org/

Paisley Rekdal
Animal Eye
2013