Michelle Bonczek Evory is the winner of the fourth annual Barry Spacks Poetry Prize for her book, The Ghosts of Lost Animals. Final judge Lee Herrick says of this book:
Michelle Bonczek’s The Ghosts of Lost Animals is full of risk, reward, gravity, invention, and surprise. There is a hunger and desire resonating through the poems that evoke the carpe diem theme with a gorgeous lyric velocity, curiosity, and wisdom. These poems explore the natural world, love and lovers, divorce and marriage, and I kept coming back to them again and again. This is a brave new voice and a marvelous book.
The Ghosts of Lost Animals is forthcoming from Gunpowder Press. Michelle Bonczek Evory is the author of The Art of the Nipple (Orange Money Publishing), Before Fort Clatsop (Finishing Line Press), A Roadside Attempt at Attraction (Celery City), as well as Naming the Unnamable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations (Open SUNY Textbooks). Her poetry has been featured in the Best New Poets Anthology and in many journals and magazines, including Crazyhorse, cream city review, Green Mountains Review, Orion Magazine, The Progressive, Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, and Water~Stone Review. In 2015, she and her husband poet Rob Evory were the inaugural Artists in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park. She currently teaches English and humanities in Kalamazoo, MI, and mentors poets at The Poet’s Billow (thepoetsbillow.org).