Michelle Bonczek Evory

Michelle Bonczek Evory was awarded the 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.

Dr. Michelle Bonczek Evory is also the author of The Art of the Nipple (Orange Money Publishing), Before Fort Clatsop (Finishing Line Press), A Roadside Attempt at Attraction (Celery City), and Naming the Unnamable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations (Open SUNY Textbooks). Her poetry has received many awards, nominations, and has been featured in the Best New Poets Anthology and in many journals and magazines, including Atlanta Review, cream city review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Orion Magazine, The Progressive, Rattle, Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, and Water~Stone Review. In 2015, she and her husband poet Robert Evory were the inaugural Artists in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park. In 2024 she was awarded an Outstanding Alumni Service Award from SUNY Brockport for her contributions to poetry, the literary community, and the accessibility of higher education. She is a Visiting Professor of Writing at Oregon Tech and mentors poets at The Poets Billow, an organization founded by her and Robert in 2012. She also teaches writing workshops with The Debt Collective fighting to eliminate student loan debt for Americans over 50. Her website is www.michellebonczekevory.com.