We are delighted to announce the winner of The Louisville Review’s National Poetry Book Contest: When We Were Gun, by Deborah Schupack, selected by Jeanie Thompson.
Available this fall from Fleur-de-Lis Press!
Deborah Schupack
“In Deborah Schupack’s When We Were Gun, America’s tragedy of school shootings unfolds in a stunningly crafted three-part drama. A child gifted in math computes the twenty-two-factorial used for the class seating chart, trying to account for his friends who ran into the hall before he heard the pops. From the point of view of parents waiting and a narrator giving witness, a vulnerable “we” emerges that understands a parent’s deepest nightmare: “We were those who waited / and those who no longer wait / those who will get their children back / and those who won’t.”
As I read this manuscript, there were school shootings around our country happening as if in a sick, surrealistic depiction of what I was reading. Which was real, which was the story? When We Were Gun is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the shattering impacts of school shootings.”
— Jeanie Thompson, author of The Myth of Water:
Poems from the Life of Helen Keller
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FINALISTS
A poem from each finalist will appear in The Louisville Review number 96 this spring.
Cynthia Rausch Allar, Body Generous
Tess Barry, The Marvelous Real
Erika Burmett, Thrum
Hollie Dugas, Filling the Gourd with Bees
Sara Kearns, Swim to Me
Pamela Manasco, Small Gifts
Joyce Schmid, White Camellias
George Such, Becoming Like the Egret
Melody Wilson, Madre Dura
THE LOUISVILLE REVIEW'S NATIONAL POETRY BOOK CONTEST
This triennial contest is for poets living in the United States who have not yet published a full-length book of poetry. Winner receives $1,000 and publication through The Louisville Review’s Fleur-de-Lis Press, and the winning book will be reviewed online in North American Review, the longest running literary magazine in the nation. Finalists receive publication of a selected, previously unpublished poem in The Louisville Review, and we will hold an online reading for the winner and finalists in fall 2025.
The Louisville Review’s National Poetry Book Contest is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Snowy Owl Foundation.
POET AND ESSAYIST JEANIE THOMPSON
is the author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, The Seasons Bear Us, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, How to Enter the River, and Lotus and Psalm. Her poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies for many years. Her essays on poetry and the writing life have also been published in Old Enough: Southern Women Writers and Artists on Creativity and Aging, Tributaries, Creativity and Compassion, Whatever Remembers Us, High Horse, Working the Dirt, All Out of Faith, The Best of Crazyhorse, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume X: Alabama.
While a student in the University of Alabama’s MFA Creative Writing Program, Jeanie led her classmates in founding the Black Warrior Review literary journal. She served as editor in chief for BWR’S first four issues (1974-76).
In 1993 Jeanie founded The Alabama Writers' Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The Forum promotes writers and writing and is an ardent supporter of literary arts education. Its award-winning Writing Our Stories program for justice-involved youth takes place on several Alabama Department of Youth Services campuses. Jeanie retired as Executive Director Emerita in 2023.
In June 2024, Jeanie received the Albert B. Head Legacy Award for her work as a literary arts advocate and award-winning poet. The Award recognizes public officials, arts patrons, or arts educators who have empowered arts to thrive in their community, creating lasting importance for future generations in Alabama and beyond.
Jeanie has been a poetry faculty member of Spalding University's Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing since 2002.
While a student in the University of Alabama’s MFA Creative Writing Program, Jeanie led her classmates in founding the Black Warrior Review literary journal. She served as editor in chief for BWR’S first four issues (1974-76).
In 1993 Jeanie founded The Alabama Writers' Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The Forum promotes writers and writing and is an ardent supporter of literary arts education. Its award-winning Writing Our Stories program for justice-involved youth takes place on several Alabama Department of Youth Services campuses. Jeanie retired as Executive Director Emerita in 2023.
In June 2024, Jeanie received the Albert B. Head Legacy Award for her work as a literary arts advocate and award-winning poet. The Award recognizes public officials, arts patrons, or arts educators who have empowered arts to thrive in their community, creating lasting importance for future generations in Alabama and beyond.
Jeanie has been a poetry faculty member of Spalding University's Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing since 2002.
