Jessica Barksdale of the Pacific Northwest Wins Sheila-Na-Gig Editions’ Annual Poetry Manuscript Award

Sheila-Na-Gig Editions is honored to announce that we’ve selected Jessica Barksdale’s collection Grim Honey: Poems as the winner of our 2020 Full-length Manuscript Contest.

Jessica Barksdale’s fifteenth novel, The Play’s the Thing, is forthcoming from TouchPoint Press in 2021. Her poetry collection When We Almost Drowned was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. A Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee, her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in the Waccamaw Journal, Salt Hill Journal, Tahoma Review, and So to Speak. Her work has been recognized and honored by The Sewanee Review, The Wigleaf, The North American Review, and The Ocotillo Review. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.

Next year, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions will be offering two chapbook contests with $500 prizes each + publication. One of these will be for writers under age 30. Look for details in January 2020. In the meantime, submissions are now open for Sheila-Na-Gig online’s winter issue (free to submit): https://sheilanagigblog.com/submissions/ and our Quarterly Poetry Contest ($7.00 fee to submit, $107 prize): https://sheilanagigblog.com/contests/

About Grimmgirl

I co-founded the small press poetry magazine Sheila-Na-Gig in California in 1990. I ran the press for 10 years, producing 14 print copies of the journal. I now hold a Ph.D. in 20th Century American Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. I am currently an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University Southern, where I teach courses in composition, American literature, and creative writing. My poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Brock Review, Proteus, Rattle, Spillway, and the critical anthologies, The Body in Medical Culture; On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs; and Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics: Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror.

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