Gulf Coast, a journal of arts and literature housed with the University of Houston’s English department, announced the winners of its annual Gulf Coast Prize, which honors writing in the categories of Poetry, Fiction, and Non-Fiction. A $1500 prize is awarded to the winners, and two honorable mentions in each genre are awarded $250.
The winners are as follows:
For Fiction: The piece “But Mostly Weeding” by Leila Renee, a current MFA student in creative writing at Syracuse University, was the winner. Judge Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah says of Renee: “Great writing makes you feel. In Leila Renee’s incredible piece, I was forced to feel a complex array of longing, anger, weariness, and hope.”
For Poetry: ” The work “Anxiety” by Lisa Fay Coutley, an Associate Professor of Poetry & Creative Nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, was the winner. Judge Natalie Diaz says of Coutley: “There is a compelling momentum occurring in the poem, a reciprocal slowing and quickening that offers neither rest or unrest, rather it creates a periphery or surround that is also a sensuality.”
For Non-Fiction: “Dispatch from the Racial Mountain” by Alison Rollins, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow and current Literary Arts MFA student at Brown University, was the winner. Judge Kiese Laymon says of Rollins: “We saw, and I’m still unsure how, a new reading of Morrison and Hughes, and this remix of the traditional notion of a peak at the top of a generational climb.”
For more about the winners, honorable mentions, judges, and subscribing to Gulf Coast, please go here.
