Selected by juror Metta Sáma
Mihee Kim's Nomenclature has been selected as the winner of Kelsey Street Press's inaugural QTBIPOC Book Contest, a free contest open to QTBIPOC-identified poets. Mihee's winning manuscript was chosen by juror Metta Sáma, author of Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), out of a submission pool of 120 manuscripts.
Sáma says of Nomenclature: "the line holds power in these poems; the impulse is the story; the stylistic experiment is about the shape of story, the complicity of language in building story through shape, through prose."
The contest provides publication along with a $1,000 cash award. Ching-In Chen, winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Poetry for recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017), will serve as editor along with a Kelsey Street Press collective member.
Mihee Kim is a writer, visual artist, and cultural organizer. She works intuitively across disciplines and traditions, foraying between writing, multi-modal collage, painting, and craft forms. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and her manuscript Nomenclature was named a finalist for the Bergman Prize. She earned a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA at California College of the Arts, where she was awarded the Leslie Scalapino Award. Mihee is also managing director of Kearny Street Workshop, a longstanding arts nonprofit for Asian Pacific Americans. She creates on Chochenyo Ohlone land, also known as beloved Oakland, California. See more of Mihee’s work here: https://www.MiheeKim.art/
Thank you to all who submitted to the prize, and congratulations to the finalists: jayy dodd, Jai Dulani, Vuyelwa Malulek, Ansley Moon, Maggie Rhee, and Ximena Keogh Serrano.
Photo credit: Neha Deshmukh @whatthewatergivesme