Summer Poetry Award Winner and Runner-Ups
Congratulations to our winner, Heather Treseler! Leila Chatti is our second place winner and Aurora Masum-Javed has been selected for third place. Thank you to all the finalists and submitters for making this such a beautifully difficult choice this year.
Look for these poems to be published on Frontier over the next few weeks. We cannot wait for you to read them.
Winner: “Louisiana Requiem” by Heather Treseler
Heather Treseler’s poems appear (or are forthcoming) in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, Obsidian, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, and The Worcester Review, among other journals, and her essays on poetry appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Consequence, Boston Review, and in four books about American poetry. An associate professor of English at Worcester State University, she is a visiting scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and, in 2018-19, a fellow at the Boston Athenaeum, where she is completing a manuscript of poems, “Thesaurus for a Year of Desire.” Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives outside of Boston.
2nd Place: “AFTER READING DJ KHALED WILL NOT PERFORM ORAL SEX ON HIS WIFE DESPITE DEMANDING THAT SHE MUST, I CONSIDER MY RELATIONSHIPS” by Leila Chatti
Leila Chatti is the author of the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, and the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, among others, and appear in Best New Poets (2015 & 2017), Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review,Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and other journals and anthologies. In 2017, she was the first North African poet to be shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing at Cleveland State University.
3rd Place: “Singularity” by Aurora Masum-Javed
Aurora Masum-Javed is a poet, performer, and educator. She recently completed her MFA in poetry at Cornell University, where she also served as a lecturer in the English department. Her poetry can be found in Nimrod, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix), Callaloo, Jaggery, and So to Speak. She was the winner of the Winter Tangerine Award, and a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize as well as the BWR Flash Prose Contest. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, Callaloo, Squaw Valley, Pink Door, and BOAAT. She is the 2018 Fall Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. She is currently working on her first collection of poems.
