Creative Writing Awards Ceremony
The 2024 undergraduate and graduate creative writing awards ceremony. Presented in partnership with The UW Program in Creative Writing.
Jessica Tanck will be the featured author for the annual UW-Madison Creative Writing Awards Ceremony. She'll be reading from her debut poetry collection, Winter Here (UGA Press, 2024), winner of the 2022 Georgia Poetry Prize.
In this collection, narrative and lyric converge to confront the marks left by violence, loss, and longing. Winter Here troubles the boundaries between home and the outside world, between reverence and terror, asking whether and where safety can be found in the wake of a mother’s suicide. Both intimate and expansive, this collection revels in pleasure as much as it contends with pain. Whether studying the way a violinist is bruised in the act of playing, invoking the crush of ice around a ship’s hull during a silence, or conjuring a crown of light surrounding strangers speaking in tongues, these poems are unflinching, imaginative, and relentless in their searching. By moving between the explicit and the oblique, pairing scorching imagery with razor-edged thought, Tanck evokes a history that haunts every word and place.
Jessica Tanck
Jessica Tanck is the author of Winter Here (UGA Press, 2024), winner of the 2022 Georgia Poetry Prize. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s MFA program, Jess grew up in Sheboygan, WI, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, Meridian, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, and others.
A recipient of the Vice Presidential Fellowship, Jess lives and writes in Salt Lake City, where she is a Ph.D. student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She served as the 2022-2023 Editor of Quarterly West.