News

2022 James Welch Prize: Open for Submissions

The 2022 James Welch Prize is open for submissions starting December 1, 2021. Poetry Northwest‘s James Welch Prize is open to new, emerging, and established poets who are community-recognized members of tribal nations within the United States and its trust territories (including American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Chamorros, and American Samoans).

We are pleased to announce that Elise Paschen is this year’s guest judge.

Photograph of Elise Paschen
Author photo, Jennifer Girard

Elise Paschen is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation and the author most recently of The Nightlife (Red Hen Press, 2017), BestiaryInfidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Paschen received the Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs Medal in 2019. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker and Poetry Magazine, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018 and Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations. She is the editor of  The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making as well as The New York Times best-selling anthology, Poetry Speaks to Children, and co-editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, among other anthologies. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is a co-founder of Poetry in Motion, a nationwide program which places poetry posters in subway cars and buses. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute and lives in Chicago with her husband and their two children.

Full guidelines & past winners are available here.