Matthew Olzmann, this year’s judge, has chosen Paperweight by Ryan Teitman of Glenside, Pennsylvania, as the 2024 Akron Poetry Prize winner. The contest received a total of 603 entries in 2024.
Regarding the winning manuscript, Olzmann states:
A cloud and a ghost enter a bar. A girl walks across an ocean. One poem has a speaker who used to be a dog; in another, he turns into a rock. Ryan Teitman is an expert at taking an unlikely premise, then building and inhabiting a little world around it. These poems often reminded me of improvisational theater in the best way: how they embrace their impossible materials, and escalate with wit and humor, often in the service of some greater mystery. But what I admired most about this book is how it evolves over time: at the beginning, I was drawn to the imaginative force of the poems. By the end, I was moved by their vulnerability and tender grace. Paperweight is a collection that will linger with me for years to come.
Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012). His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review, and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Glenside, Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter.
The judge for the 2025 Akron Poetry Prize competition will be Eduardo C. Corral.
Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He's the author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.
The guidelines for the annual Akron Poetry Prize competition may be found here.
2024 Akron Poetry Prize Finalists
The Song Inside Your Body by Amanda Auchter
I don’t speak flower by Shelly Cato
Singing Ground by Samantha DeFlitch
Heartland Errata by Dante Di Stefano
Certain Species of Want by Cristi Donoso
I’ll Take My Body To-Go by Kindall Fredricks
Blade of Hunger by Sonia Greenfield
Bachelor by Gustavo Hernandez
Protagonist by Peter Kline
Happy Monday from My Skull by Elizabeth Knapp
Epilogue to Paradise by Ryan Clinesmith Montalvo
In My Dreams I’m Never Beautiful by Maya Salameh
Little Knives by Dara-Lyn Shrager
Kowarski Agonistes by John Surowiecki