UNT Rilke Prize | Department of English

UNT Rilke Prize

NOW ACCEPTING ENTRIES FOR 2025 RILKE PRIZE

The UNT Rilke Prize awards $10,000 to a collection that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year. The prize is named after the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), a writer whose work embodies the qualities of ambition, intellectual and imaginative scope, and technical mastery we seek to recognize.

The submission period for the 2025 UNT Rilke Prize begins August 1, 2024 and closes November 30, 2024.

Submission Guidelines

· Entrants must have published at least two previous books of poetry.

· Work must be original poetry written in English.

· Eligible books must have been published between November 2023 and October 2024.

· Books may be submitted by presses or by writers themselves and must be postmarked by November 30, 2024.

· Each submission must include 3 copies of the book and a completed entry form.

· Chapbooks are not considered previous publications.

· Self-published books will not be considered.

· Books authored by friends or former students of the judges will not be considered.

· Finalists may be asked to submit further copies.

· No submission fee.

· Books will not be returned.

The winner will travel to UNT for a reading and book signing to be scheduled in Fall 2025. The author must also allow portions of the winning work to be reproduced for promoting the award. Poets who enter the prize must agree to these terms in order to accept the prize.

HOW TO SUBMIT?
Authors or publishers will mail completed entry form with three copies of the book submission to the address at the bottom of the form. Please download entry form here.

The UNT Rilke Prize was founded in 2011 and is offered by Creative Writing and the Department of English.

For questions or more info, contact UNTrilkeprize@unt.edu

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2024 UNT Rilke Prize

Kevin Prufer's The Fears (Copper Canyon Press) has won the 2024 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. Prufer will be present for two events: Prufer will visit UNT on October 9th and 10th for a reading and book signing.

In The Fears, his ninth collection, Kevin Prufer examines how each of us becomes "a dying animal body," eventually losing what makes us human to sickness, grief, and even the indifference of the nation state. The poems place the ancient Greeks and Romans alongside vivdly rendered portraits of loved ones--a father dying of cancer, for instance--so that the epic, heroic past becomes a lens for meditating on the small, intimate tragedies of the present. And those intimate tragedies in turn yield ways of encountering the larger conflicts of our own historical moment. In lines that slide jaggedly across the page, Prufer moves between what he calls "mundanity" and "vastness," attempting to understand "the erasure of the self / into vastness" and, beyond that erasure, "the failures of empires." Bleak, clear-eyed, bracingly unsentimental, and insistent on the necessity of precise, accurate language, The Fears asks readers to remain politically engaged, to continue caring about the world. The poet urges us, even though we are mortal and will one day end up like Antigone, "nowhere," to keep paying attention to the vivid, haunting moments that comprise our lives: the broken finger of a mummy, a frozen bottle of wine, the "little pink tongue" of a lost kitten.

Click here for the press flyer.

Photos from our October 2024 UNT Rilke Prize events:

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UNT Rilke Prize Recipients:

Click covers for more information.

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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.

Photos from our October 2023 UNT Rilke Prize events:

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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:

Congratulations, Valzhyna!

Valzhyna Mort, Jeff Doty, Corey Marks

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Click here for press flyer.

Author photo: Tanya Kapitonava

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UNT Rilke Prize Recipients:

Click covers for more information.

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Valzhyna Mort

Music for the Dead and Resurrected

2022

https://www.valzhynamort.com/books

Click here for an audio file of Valzhyna Mort's campus reading on October 27, 2022.

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Kiki Petrosino

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

2021

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

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Kathleen Graber

The River Twice

2020

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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/

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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/

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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/

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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/

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Mark Wunderlich

The Earth Avails

2015

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/

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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/

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Paisley Rekdal

Animal Eye

2013

Click here for more information about the 2013 winner!

https://www.paisleyrekdal.com/

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Laura Kasischke

Space, in Chains

2012

Click here for more information about our inaugural winner!

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Contact: UNTrilkeprize@unt.edu