2019 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize opens Feb 15!

Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize Judge

This year, we are excited to announce our 2019 judge: 

Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetryanthologies,Buzzfeed, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. His first book, Please(New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University.

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Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize 

$500 cash prize for a single poem. The winner and finalists will be published in the following issue of Crab Creek Review, and all entries will be considered for publication. 

Submissions open February 15, 2019.

Near the Inter-Urban Trail, After Working Evening Shift, by Richard Widerkehr

Richard Widerkehr’s second book of poems is In the Presence of Absence
(MoonPath Press). He has three chapbooks and one novel, Sedimental
Journey (Tarragon Books). Recent work has appeared in Rattle, Arts & Letters,
and Bellevue Literary Review. Richard’s poems are forthcoming in Atlanta
Review, Blueline, and Natural Bridge. He reads poetry for Shark Reef Review.

About the poem:

I wrote the first draft of “Near The Interurban Trail, After Working Evening Shift”
back in 1985 when I had a German Shepherd-Collie mix who was fun, smart, and
stubborn.

Documentarian with Broken Camera Following Documentary Crew with Broken Cameras, by Ross White

Ross White is the author of two chapbooks, How We Came Upon the
Colony and The Polite Society. His poems have appeared in American Poetry
Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review,
among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.

About the poem:
I was talking to a young poet who told me she utterly rejected narrative, and asked
if she could tell me a story that would explain why. “Documentarian with Broken
Camera Following Documentary Crew with Broken Cameras” followed soon after. I
thought, “Maybe I’ll reject narrative, too.” So of course, Zeus showed up, an entity
so perfectly narrative that he might as well have appeared to the Greeks in the
form of a novel.

A List of My Symptoms, by Ellen Welcker

Ellen Welcker’s books are Ram Hands (Scablands Books, 2016) and The
Botanical Garden (2009 Astrophil Poetry Prize, Astrophil Press, 2010). She is
a recipient of a 2016 GAP grant from Artist Trust, for The Pink Tablet; a chapbook
of these poems was published by Fact-Simile Books in 2018. She lives in Spokane, WA.

About the poem:
“A List of My Symptoms” came out of the act of observing and documenting the
bumper sticker-style part of my culture which seems to mostly say “FU to anyone
not me.” It weighs on a person! It feels good to observe it growing collectively more
and more ridiculous, though it’s undeniably sickening, as well.