“When I’m asked why I left my country of birth, a short formula eludes me,” reflects Anatoly Molotkov in his new memoir, A Broken Russia Inside Me. “It was an absurd place devoid of freedom, initiative, and books….Is this enough?” (39). Spanning over three decades, the book, set in Russia and the United States, takes us through the author’s escape from the repression of the USSR to the author’s often idealized America.

When he leaves his native country, his family, and his friends, Molotkov is a young student of mathematics, the field both of his parents work in, with dreams of becoming a writer or a filmmaker, to live his life with freedom and artistic purpose, qualities the Soviet regime quashes. No artistic practice that isn’t in favor of the establishment is allowed to thrive there, let alone exist. After a stint in the army, where it’s dangerous even to go to the latrine at night, young Anatoly travels with a couple of friends from his native Leningrad to Moscow to request a US visa, which, if granted, will signify the freedom that is impossible to attain at home.

Tola, as he is known to his loved ones, leaves behind his parents, friends, and beloved 86-year-old Babushka, whom he will never see in person again. He also leaves behind Luba, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, to eventually also bring her over to the States, based on what seems like loyalty to his first big youthful romance rather than true love. Upon the new mother’s arrival (by this point she has given birth to a daughter with another man, a husband she has left behind), Tola asks how her trip was, and she responds, “Terrible…Can you imagine flying eighteen hours with a baby?” (60)

For Tola and Luba, cohabitation is difficult from the beginning. Arranging childcare is complicated, and they are financially strained: they roam the New York City streets at night to collect bottles to recycle in exchange for money. These passages are full of the tension and exhaustion of new immigrants. These are young people who have been forced to grow up too quickly under a totalitarian regime and are now confronted with adulthood in a completely new land where the rules of life are different, and the responsibility for their lives falls only on them.

Still, only a few months in, Anatoly loves his new life in the US. Parting ways with Luba gives him the tranquility he craves. He talks movies and books with the customers at the deli where he manages the night shift, while back home, “the USSR is no more” (65). Of his new life, he writes:

I write after I get off work at four a.m. and watch a film or two before going to work around ten in the morning….My accent is noticeable the moment I begin to speak. The cultural references I bring are vastly different from those most locals share. This doesn’t bother me. It frees me from some of the inessential conventions. It offers me a license to be myself, whoever that may be. (65)

Moloktov’s writing goes back, over and over again, to the idea of freedom. The potential, and then frustrated freedom of a nation no longer under a communist regime, yes, but personal freedom, too. After moving to the West Coast, Tola transforms his personal appearance into an extension of this freedom: he dyes his hair like a rainbow and wears multicolored clothing wherever he goes. He gets a stable administrative job and occasionally speaks to his loved ones back in Russia. But he doesn’t miss the place. He stops writing in Russian, claiming, “What good will it do to be bound by the language of the dead Soviet empire? I’ve already given it up by moving away. My future as a Russian writer ends here” (81). There is no melancholy, no sentimentality, no mourning the potential loss of a mother tongue. This is a memoir that, by writing about the past, wants to look to the future.

But not all is perfect in Tola’s new home. As anyone who spends enough time in a place that once was new realizes, no place is perfect. After nine years in the US, Moloktov is particularly concerned about “the racism, the homelessness, the poverty, the overinflated patriotism blended with militarism, the disastrous meddling in other areas of the world…” (93). He is now married and a father to a young son, and he is conscious of the shadow these realities cast on a life that is just beginning.

One of the most pivotal events in Moloktov’s life and in this memoir is his mother’s death in Russia, not long after her first visit to the United States. Before her death, the writer has been trying to convince her to move to America, but he seems unsure of whether this move would actually work. “I’m not even certain moving to the U.S. is her best choice,” he writes. “Am I locked into a mental pattern in which my émigré guilt is supposed to be assuaged by her move to this better new environment?” (97). His mother seems hesitant, too, but in the end, the decision is made by a cancer that erupts in her body and takes her from this world on Christmas Eve, 2004. This event forces Tola to return to a country to which he feels no allegiance and where his loved ones keep dwindling. His return is a sour one anyway, full of money disputes with the man who’d married his mother later in life and uneasy wonder at the changes that have taken place since the end of the USSR. Of St. Petersburg, he writes:

The city…brims with flashy and trashy places: bars, pubs, restaurants, stores of all sorts, many open around the clock, offering friendly service and U.S.-level prices. Incongruous cuisine fusions have taken hold, such as Italian/Sushi/Steak. On Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main avenue, a McDonald’s sits near an old bookstore, each housed in a fancy eighteenth century building likely erected by an architect of world renown. People in the city center are carefully dressed, the locals more elegant and fit than most tourists. It’s a fake paradise I won’t miss. (105)

And yet, it’s a place he returns to, at least once more, at the behest of his new partner, Laurie. They talk half-jokingly about the possibility of his being arrested by the “evil Russians” (122). They visit an eccentric friend’s dacha, as well as trendy bookstores and cafes in the city of St. Petersburg. But even through all of this, Tola’s active hatred of Russia and what it does in Ukraine starting in the second decade of the twenty first century looms. And yet, questions that continue to tie him to this place remain: what happened to his biological father? What did his adoptive father go through during the Siege of Leningrad?

These are difficult and emotional inquiries that only people in the sunset of their lives, people who live in Russia, can answer. And despite Tola’s utter distaste for the place, he perseveres. He asks the hard questions, even when he feels he should leave his ninety-year-old father be. He asks because these things still occupy an important place in his memory. Because the memories of his childhood skiing trips with his family and friends are tangled up with the places where Stalin’s atrocities were committed. Because to understand why some left and others stayed, one must honor the complexity of their history.

A Broken Russia Inside Me is a book that contends with impossible questions about identity, nationalism, and belonging head on. One gets the sense that in his account of life in the USSR and migration to the United States, the circumstances that have earned Molotkov the right to tell it have left him in a place where the only option is to tell it through unflinching, sometimes brutal, honesty. It is an inviting book that looks at complex global questions through one writer’s individual experience, a writer who studied and worked hard to find a voice and now, an audience.

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We are thrilled to announce that this year’s winning manuscript of the Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry is The Resurrection of the Body by Kirk Schlueter. Schlueter is a writer and teacher based out of St. Louis, where he lives with his wife and son. His poetry has been awarded the Frontier Prize for New Poets judged by Victoria Chang, as well as an Illinois Arts Council Award, and has appeared in journals such as Bat City Review, RHINO, Diode, Third Coast, Nimrod, River Styx, Passages North, Ninth Letter, Natural Bridge, The Pinch, Grist, Radar Poetry, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal among others. Fellowships include the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College, Kenyon College Writers Workshop for Teachers, and University Fellowship at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and can be found on his website.

Of Schlueter’s manuscript, one of our judges and poetry editor, Paul Corrigan, says:

In The Resurrection of the Body, through poems both narrative and lyrical, Kirk Schlueter tells necessary stories of male anorexia. These are stories that have largely been erased from broader social narratives by patriarchal assumptions about eating disorders. In an early poem in the book, titled “Ten Million American Men Will Suffer from an Eating Disorder During Their Lives,” the poet underscores anorexia’s gendered inflection by recalling a health teacher in school talking about body image and saying, “Girls, this is important, pay attention.” He also recalls some of the very boys mocking female classmates for disordered eating only to eventually find themselves suffering from the same disorder and uttering the same lie: “I’m fine.” Later in “The Anorexic’s Aubade,” Schlueter dramatizes the difficulties that loathing oneself can create for loving and being loved by another. A couple wakes and eats breakfast together—barely. The beloved eats just a “knuckle of food,” while the speaker “shoved my own eggs around // so it seemed I’d eaten more.” Later, the two are “rent apart / like meat cleaving off a bone.” The juxtaposition of food and body imagery (knuckle and bone, eggs and meat) links the breakfast and the breakup in a shared illness. But Schlueter’s stories are not only about illness. The final poem in the book, “The Body as Metaphor,” brings us to a place that is “healthy?” That question mark refuses any simplistic notion that all is well. But by now, the poet can declare: “I wanted to die, / & now I don’t.” That’s no small progress for any man or anyone.

Please join us in congratulating Kirk!

The Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry (formerly the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry) is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review. Submissions are now being accepted for 2026.

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This year’s winning story is “Milk Bottle Churches” by Jay McKenzie. McKenzie’s work appears in adda, Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream, and others. She recently won the Fish Short Story Prize, was runner up in the Tom Grass Literary Award, and has won, placed, or shortlisted in competitions including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her novel How to Lose the Lottery will be published by Harper Fiction in March 2026.

Of the winning story, Ayana Mathis says:

Heartbreaking. Lyrically and beautifully written. This writer shows a deep facility with storytelling and knows when to reveal and when to withhold. The characters were well-rendered. The story’s use of figurative language was gorgeous, and more importantly, this writer understands that such language can be used to evoke the mood of the story as a whole, not merely the sentence or clause in which it appears: “On the sepia-tinted west bank of the Ex . . .” or  “. . . a dress that looks like a week-old bruise . . .” Time is also handled incredibly well; though the story’s current action takes place years after that fateful summer, those events haunt this story. The writer cleverly shows us how much the present is beholden to the past. I can’t think of a better macro-metaphor than the titular milk bottles thrown into the sea so long ago: one still carrying its message, the other smashed on a shore thousands of miles away.

Please join us in congratulating Jay, and we hope you’ll keep us in mind when submissions open once again in the fall!

Thank you all for sending us your work.

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Flower Conroy has won the 2024 Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry for the collection, Zoodikers: A Bestiary. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2025 by the University of Tampa Press. 

LGBTQIA+ artist, former Key West Poet Laureate, and NEA and MacDowell Fellow, Flower Conroy is the author of “Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder” (NFSPS’s Barbara Stevens’ contest winner), “A Sentimental Hairpin,” “Greenest Grass” (Lynx’s House Press’ Blue Lynx Prize winner), and the forthcoming “And Scuttle My Balloon,” co-authored with Donna Spruijt-Metz.

Conroy has led workshops at/for The Studios of Key West, La Romita School of Art, Write Here, Write Now, and others. In addition to care-giving and free-lancing editing, Conroy is working on a series of Ephemeral Altars—impermanent assemblage art pieces that visually evoke and celebrate poetry collections (which can be found on social media).

Conroy describes the collection:

To understand anything—or to attempt to—is to discover distinctions and similarities conflux, flip, muddle, resist, meld, blur, reflect; boundaries are plastic if not arbitrary, the world and its inhabitants are fragile, everything is interconnected—“Zoodikers: A Bestiary” is my attempt to write through and towards this. Part personal inventory, part existential dread mediation, part hope anthem, I wanted this collection of prose-poems to more wildly explore the abstractions and examine the realities bedeviling me. Midlife. The body. Sickness. Extinction. Sex. Sexuality. Age difference in a relationship. In a queer relationship. Juxtaposition and contradiction. Confession and confrontation. Life, birth and childlessness. Death, the future, the past, AI. What is human and what is animal. How do we account for that which we don’t account for, what do we compromise when we compromise? How we hurt one another. How we heal.

Tampa Review judges praise Conroy’s collection, stating:

Zoodikers, its title from an obsolete 18th-Century interjection of surprise, makes Flower Conroy’s case for revival not just of the word itself, but for the art of the bestiary, the book here in a dazzling revisionist form of a bestiary itself, being of animal, cryptid, and spirits good, evil, indifferent and sometimes other.  In “Echidna”, the speaker, in describing the pins of acupuncture, imagines themselves as the echidna, the spiked anteater, “filiform splinter embedded in the meridian of my soft spot, crown of the governing vessel”, that space between the “mind’s long lists of past due & to do & will it so” and the bestiary induction of the creature behind poetry, that sublime “axis of a planet yet discovered, blood temples”.  

Elsewhere, Zoodikers makes a Moore-esque case for the extinct dodo and the quagga, their histories, and, via the true resurrectionist possibilities of our shared art, makes another case for all the same potentialities of our nature and the “lavender & melody” we still have, this acknowledged by Conroy as being continuously undercut by the same-such us.  Our meadows and habitats, and the creatures within them, even exist electric in cyberspace, and are shown to us in Conroy’s “Ibex”, where Conroy says “it was written: When Thriving Ibex enters the battlefield you get   (two energy counters) but I misread it as encounters”, Conroy’s bestiary existing in time, place, and no-place, wanting a communion across them all.

Answers are sought for the pursuit of that: from Ouija boards and James Merrill, from the horseshoe crab, from the “real biological weirdo” the tardigrade, while, all throughout, unsolicited answers come from the Bigfoot threat of the patriarchy, interpellations of the Virgin Mary, and the zoodiker itself of the night-time incubus.  Long-gone animals obscure themselves, and fossil records take their circuits in the dark in “Lazarus Taxa”, while their fossil collectors like Mary Anning dip in and out of the account, all while lovers name animals after other lovers at zoos, and the speaker reinvents the ars poetica in “Parroting”, the life, which is poetic for us all, interjecting likewise as the much-beloved elephant gets traced from Dali to the riding of one singular elephant at a small-town carnival.      

Zoodikers is a major book, in the middle of itself and our world. The empathy, the humanity, and the inventiveness find their spaces in Conroy’s remarkable compendium of life, their bestiary as equally comfortable in being grimoire, taxonomy, and encyclopaedia.  It’s a startling achievement, bringing us to our own interjection of surprise, and up there with the best books I’ve read in years.

The Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry (formerly the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry) is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review. Submissions are now being accepted for 2025.

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