The Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize honors two high school teachers, Michael Dryden and Susan Vreeland, who were influential in lives of Gunpowder’s editors. It is awarded every two years to a poet who works in (or retired from) K-12 education.
Poems need not focus on schools or teaching, and all K-12 school employees—teachers, tutors, custodians, administrators—are eligible.
The next submission period will be in 2027, between May 1 and August 30. The prize includes $1000, publication by Gunpowder Press and 10 author copies.
2025 Competition
Gunpowder Press and Marsha de la O, final judge, have selected TWO winners for the Dryden-Vreeland Prize: Jessica Purdy’s Lung Hours and Christine Marshall’s Night Halves. Both books will be published by Gunpowder Press in 2026.Thank you to Marsha de la O for her careful consideration in making the final selection.
The three other finalists for the prize were:
- Rachel Becker’s Want the Heat
- Valerie Lawson’s Hope On the Rising Tide
- Kathy Pon’s Gospels of Dung and Tenderness
About Jessica Purdy and Lung Hours: Previously a finalist for the Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize, Jessica Purdy lives in coastal New Hampshire with her family. Her poems have appeared in Action, Spectacle, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, Gone Lawn, SoFloPoJo, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Emerson College. She has also been a finalist in Two Sylvias Press Wilder Poetry Book Prize, Action, Spectacle Book Prize, Codhill Press’ Guest Editor Poetry Series 2023, and The Granite State Poetry Prize. She is the author of five books of poetry including her chapbook The Adorable Knife: Poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press) which received the NH Writers’ Project People’s Choice Award. Her other books include STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate Books) which was a NH Literary Award for Poetry finalist. She teaches Creative Writing at SNHU and at Noble High School in North Berwick, Maine. Her book’s title refers to the “lung hours” on the circadian clock, the time of night for deep sleep, dreams, and memory. These poems reflect themes of motherhood, feminism, anxiety, and the surreal through the exploration of dreams and memories that blur the line between waking and sleep.
About Christine Marshall and Night Halves: Christine Marshall is a poet and essayist. She received her PhD from the University of Utah before moving to the South to teach. Her first book of poems, Match, was published by Unicorn Press and her poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun. She lives in Charlotte, NC. Night Halves explores the complex, sometimes-fraught spaces of shifting family realities and mythologies. Juxtaposing the demands of pandemic motherhood and encroaching illness, these lyric poems navigate the profound complexities of joy and grief, seeking an ease that feels alternately inconceivable and unnatural. Restless, probing, in language that is at once delicate and demanding, the poems in this collection examine time, mortality, and the dynamic renewal of the natural world as they grasp for an understanding that flees as soon as it arrives.
2023 Competition
Final judge Nan Cohen selected Christopher Blackman for his manuscript Three-Day Weekend, published by Gunpowder Press in 2024. Other finalists were:
- Jasmine Marshall Armstrong, The School Custodian’s Daughter
- Kirsten Casey, Grieving Birds
- Nicelle Davis, Ars/Ours
- James Dickson, Hoping to Embrace the Moon
- Alicia Hoffman, You Are Browsing as a Guest
- Barry Peters, The Cohesion of Fizz
- Jessica Purdy, Lung Hours
Christopher Blackman is a poet from Columbus, Ohio. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Cleaver Magazine, Southeast Review, Booth, and Epiphany, among other publications. Former co-host of the podcast Poem Party, he received his MFA from Columbia University, and has been an instructor for the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop. He was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a semi-finalist for the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. He currently lives outside of Boston and is the Admission and Financial Aid Database Manager at Dana Hall School, a 5-12 Day and Boarding Girls School in Wellesley, Massachusetts.