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Results of the 2023 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York


AUGUST 14, 2023    |    CONTEST RESULTS





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The editors of Southern Humanities Review are proud to announce the results of our tenth annual poetry contest honoring the late Jake Adam York, award-winning poet and alumnus of Auburn University’s creative writing program. This year’s final judge—celebrated poet Joy Harjo—selected our winner. The winner, runners-up, and finalists will appear together in Volume 56.3, which will be published in the Fall of 2023.

The poems and poets honored this year are preceded by an outstanding collection of work from our 2014 - 2022 Auburn Witness Poetry Prizes. Learn more about Jake Adam York, our prize, and past winners here.


WINNER

Samyak Shertok

for his poem “Mother Tongue: A Haunting”

Samyak Shertok’s poems appear in Best New Poets, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, New England Review, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the AWP Intro Journals Award, and the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry. Originally from Nepal, he holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah and is currently a Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing at Southern Methodist University.

OUR WINNER RECEIVES $1,000 AND WILL PARTICIPATE IN A READING PRESENTED BY THE JULE COLLINS SMITH MUSEUM OF FINE ART AT AUBURN UNIVERSITY THIS OCTOBER TO READ HIS POETRY ALONGSIDE CONTEST JUDGE JOY HARJO.



RUNNERS-UP

Hussain Ahmed   “Sand Therapy”
Shannan Mann   “a poem of many births”


FINALISTS

Jessica Cohn   “Body”
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach   “10 Months Since the Full-Scale Invasion of My Birthplace as Math Problem”
David Moolten   “Grindelia Squarrosa”
Jed Myers   “Empathy's Shadow”
Wesley Rothman   “Chasing a Fugitive”
Melanie Tafejian   “Zeitun”
Felicia Zamora   “The Dead Sea Is Dying”


OUR RUNNERS-UP AND FINALISTS WILL HAVE THEIR WORK PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 56.3 ALONGSIDE THE CONTEST'S WINNER.


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