Diode is pleased to share that Dr. Joey S. Kim and Conor Bracken are two of five finalists for the Ohioana Book Award in the poetry category for their debut works: Body Facts and The Enemy of My Enemy is Me.
The 2022 poetry finalists are:
Ahn, E. Yetunde, née Emily Spencer. East Walnut Hills, Zone 3 Press
Bracken, Conor. The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, Diode Editions
Iris, Manuel. The Parting Present / Lo que se irá, Dos Madres Press
Kim, Joey S. Body Facts, Diode Editions
Zamora, Felicia. I Always Carry My Bones, University of Iowa Press
The winners will be announced in July. The 2022 Ohioana Awards ceremony will be held at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus on Wednesday, October 26.
From the Ohioana Library press release—
First given in 1942, the awards are the second-oldest state literary prizes in the nation and honor outstanding works by Ohio authors and illustrators in five categories: Fiction, Poetry, Juvenile Literature, Middle Grade/Young Adult Literature, and Nonfiction. The sixth category, About Ohio or an Ohioan, may also include books by non-Ohio authors.
This year’s stellar list includes a Pulitzer Prize winner, three finalists for the National Book Award, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist, and winners of the Coretta Scott King Book Award, the Caldecott Medal, Newbery Honors, and the Kirkus Prize. Four finalists have had their works adapted for film and television. Eight authors are previous Ohioana Book Award winners and two are past recipients of Ohioana’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant for emerging writers.
Beginning June 1, Ohioana will profile all the finalists with “30 Books, 30 Days,” a special feature on our social media in which one finalist is highlighted each day. Later in June, Ohioana will launch its seventh Readers’ Choice Award poll, allowing the public to vote online for their favorite book from the finalists.
About the Authors
Joey S. Kim is a scholar, creative writer, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toledo. Her poetry ventures through Korean history, the feminine body, U.S. foreign policy, and coming-of-age in midwestern America. She researches nineteenth-century global Anglophone literature and poetics. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pleiades: Literature in Context, Burningword Literary Journal, Essays in Romanticism, and elsewhere. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee for her poem "Plunder," a poem in her debut chapbook of poems, Body Facts, and first published in Pleiades.
Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the fifth annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). His poems and translations have earned fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Frost Place, Inprint, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. An assistant poetry editor at Four Way Review, he currently teaches English at the University of Findlay, and lives in Ohio with his wife, daughter, and dog.
