Curriculum

Curriculum by Meghan Dunn was selected by Jessica Jacobs as the winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.

“In Meghan Dunn’s incisive debut, we encounter a speaker both student and teacher. These poems delve into the moments that forged her, while offering timely accounts of trying to shepherd students through America’s dark racial history, bearing witness to modern-day lynchings, active shooter drills, and the shock of classmates dead far too soon. Beautifully crafted, every lesson bears surprises: “Cartography” is a study in the landscape of bodies and drift of borders; “Foreign Language,” in the difficulty of holding another’s grief; “Grammar Lesson,” in the moments that reveal us as less than the person we’d most like to be. In Curriculum, all of life, with its many loves and losses, is on the syllabus, and like the best classes, these poems reintroduce us to wonder, making us students again of a world we thought we already knew..”

—Jessica Jacobs, Spacks Prize final judge,
author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going