Huge congratulations to Majda Gama for winning Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize this year for her poem “In Great Aunt Noor’s Salon”!
Judge Anna Maria Hong said, “I’m enthralled by this poem’s movements recollecting recent wars and their reverberations through our current catastrophes, the collateral and casual destructions of empire, as the poet deftly traverses time and place, melding the domestic and the geopolitical, sirens and silence. The poem’s remarkable central image depicting how private mysteries unfold amid those devastations leaves us with an expected gift: Wonder.”
A second congratulations to our runner up poem, “The Starving Time” by Desiree Santana.
Both poems will be published in our Spring 2024 issue.