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Kirk Schlueter Wins the 2025 Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry

Kirk Schlueter headshot

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.

Flower Conroy Wins 2024 Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry

Flower Conroy

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.

Scott Frey wins 2023 Tampa Review Poetry Prize

Image of a man with folded arms smiling into the camera.
Poet Scott Frey

Scott Frey has won the 2023 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection, Heavy Metal Nursing. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2024 by the University of Tampa Press. 

 Scott Frey grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy. He learned to teach and found his first writing community at The Landmark School. He then found a wonderful writers’ community during his years teaching at The Ethel Walker School. He also served as a parent advisor for the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children’s Hospital, Boston. He and his wife run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses improve their quality of life.

Among other publications, he has work forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, One, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the 2023 Perkoff Prize for poetry. His prose chapbook, Night Nurses, was a winner in the 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.

Tampa Review judges praised Frey’s collection, stating:

“Heavy Metal Nursing tells a story of love, the poet Scott Frey’s love for his firstborn daughter. It is not a sentimental love but a “heavy-metal” one, complicated by the hard facts of his daughter’s life: she was born with a severe brain injury, needed intensive care her entire life, and died at three years old. This book is the work of a poet and a parent in equal measure. These are poems of vulnerability and pain, of course, but simultaneously of parenting, caregiving, marriage, medicine, humor, tenderness, affection. Frey brings poetic technique to bear on personal trauma, narrative on desolation, love on loss.”

Frey says, “This collection is an attempt to depict the mix of sorrow and wonder we lived with our daughter during her traumatic birth and medically complex life. Even when our days felt like long tunnels, we were surprised by the care and kindness of our communities. This helped shape our responses to her absence and our responses to the ways her presence continues in a way unknowable beforehand.

Many of the poems began as a method of reaching towards the nurses, doctors, therapists, friends, and family who offered to our daughter and to us such exquisite attention and dedication.

The struggle to craft these narrative lines gave me a way to distill the chaos and emotions roiling within many of our most haunting scenes and memories. It gave me a form for placing lines of grit and despair arm-to-arm with lines of laughter and joy.”

This year the judges also announced two finalists:

Bruised Light: Collected Father by John Pijewski

Miss La La and the Cirque Fernando by Gavin Moses

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 2024.

Test Your Literary Toughness

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seriouskid

Reading Flavorwire’s “50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers” challenged my literary fortitude. I found myself wanting to buy a bunch of new books, then take kickboxing lessons, hit the gym, or maybe dive of a cliff.

I applaud the effort to compile a list of fifty tough books. Even putting this list together required its own toughness and determination. I would have agonized over leaving off Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and struggled with including Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. It’s a great collection, but tough or extreme? I don’t see it.

The guidelines for this list were clear. The books included some that were “absurdly long, some notoriously difficult, some with intense or upsetting subject matter but blindingly brilliant prose, some packed into formations that require extra effort or mind expansion, and some that fit into none of those categories, but are definitely for tough girls (or guys) only.”

Here are a few highlights from the list.

  1. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
  2. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
  3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  4. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  5. JR by William Gaddis
  6. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
  7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  8. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
  9. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  10. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
  11. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
  12. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
  13. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
  14. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
  15. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  16. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  17. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
  18. Tampa by Alissa Nutting
  19. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
  20. The Tunnel by William Gass

Check the Flavorwire post for the complete list and reasons for each novel’s inclusion.