The University of Nebraska Press is proud to announce the winner of the Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry for 2023: Julie Choffel and her manuscript Dear Wallace.   

“I’m thrilled that Dear Wallace won this prize and honored to work with Backwaters Press!” said Choffel. “So much of writing this book has been an imagined conversation—with Wallace Stevens, with other women’s voices, and with poetry itself—and publication opens up that conversation in exciting ways. What does it mean to make art in our everyday lives, despite everything that would tell us our creativity isn’t enough? I think we all want to find out, and I am grateful to Hilda Raz and the editors for seeing a place for this book in the world.” 

Choffel will be awarded $2,000 for her winning collection and it will be published in the fall of 2024. Choffel is the author of The Hello Delay (Fordham University Press) and a handful of chapbooks including The Chicories (Ethel Press) and The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love (Finishing Line Press). She lives near Hartford with her family and teaches at the University of Connecticut. 

The judge this year was Hilda Raz, who is the editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press and the poetry editor for ABQ (in)Print and Bosque Press. She is the author or editor of fourteen books, including her most recent book, Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986-2020, edited by Kwame Dawes.  

“The poet as Wallace Stevens’ inheritor interrogates many platitudes about art as she inserts herself into the Canon,” said Raz. “I love this book and its spare and brilliant inquiry.” 

The honorable mention is Brandel France de Bravo. She will be awarded $1,000 and her manuscript, Locomotive Cathedral, will be published in the spring of 2025.  

Of Locomotive Cathedral, Raz said, “I was delighted by the wit of the speaker, her refusal to be downed by the isolation and grief caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as drug and AIDs deaths she remembers, and cancer.”  

France de Bravo is the author of Mother, Loose (Accents Publishing) and Provenance (Washington Writers’ Publishing House). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, and elsewhere.  

“I am thrilled to be joining the Backwaters Press and University of Nebraska family!” said France de Bravo. “Transformation is a recurring theme in Locomotive Cathedral. I’m delighted that these poems, which explore the very human desire for permanence and control in a world of ceaseless flux, spoke to judge Hilda Raz.” 

The 2022 Backwaters Prize winner was Laura Reece Hogan of Los Angeles, California. Her winning collection Butterfly Nebula will publish in October 2023. The University of Nebraska Press acquired Backwaters Press in 2018 and continues its yearly poetry prize. For more information on the Backwaters Press Prize, visit nebraskapress.unl.edu/the-backwaters-press-prize-in-poetry/.