2024 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize Winner

Howling Bird Press is pleased to announce that Emily Hyland is the winner of the 2024 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript Divorced Business Partners. The manuscript was selected by students at Augsburg University’s MFA program from a short-list of nine finalists and will be published by Howling Bird Press in fall 2024.

Divorced Business Partners follows spouses as they take on a business venture and open a restaurant. The little business quickly becomes successful, but their marriage collapses in the process. Before they know it, husband and wife are nothing more than divorced business partners.

Emily Hyland’s poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Hollins Critic, among others. She earned her MFA in poetry and her MA in English education from Brooklyn College. Her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, in 2018. Hyland is the eponymous co-founder of the international restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily + Emmy Squared Pizza. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she writes and teaches yoga. emilyhyland.com / emmysquaredpizza.com / pizzalovesemily.com

Howling Bird Press, the publishing house of Augsburg University’s MFA in Creative Writing, offers an annual prize that results in book publication. As a teaching press, we are staffed by graduate students enrolled in our Publishing Concentration. Our prize alternates genres annually, from poetry to fiction to nonfiction. In April 2024, we will open for submissions for our Fiction prize. We hope to see your manuscript then.

2024 Howling Bird Press Poetry Contest Finalists and Semifinalists

Congrats to the Finalists of the 2024 Howling Bird Press Poetry Contest (listed in alphabetical order)

A winner will be selected from this finalist list in January 2024 and announced by February.

  • Villain(era), John Andrews
  • subway psalms, Tamar Ashdot
  • Venus of the Midwest, Justine Defever
  • Divorced Business Partners, Emily Hyland
  • Gothic, April Lindner
  • Thirsty, C. Eliot Mullins
  • Imagine a Woman, Dorothy Neagle
  • Heartbreak and Spaceships in the Age of Extraterrestrials, Osmani Ochoa
  • Mending of a Body, TW Sia

And congratulations to our semifinalists:

  • Finding Meteorites in Antarctica, Paul Brooke
  • The Book of Drought, Robert Carney
  • Fortuna Redux, Faith Ellington
  • The Stoop and the Steeple, Nancy Meyer
  • Refugee, Erika Michael
  • All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths, Samodh Porawagamage
  • Otherly, Rebecca Reynolds
  • Rooting for Spices, Rod Carlos Rodriguez
  • A Wonder of Furies, Stella Witcher

Thank you to all our incredible submitters. We were blown away by the quality of the submissions we received and had an incredibly difficult time narrowing down to these semifinalists and finalists. We appreciate the talent, time, and dedication that goes into putting together such works and look forward to seeing you continue to blow readers away in your future writing endeavors!