TEA XXVI

“Armageddon à la Rockwell” by Olivia Maynard — The Blackbird Prize for Poetry

“I have mixed feelings about poetry prizes. The real reward, I think, is to be chosen for publication alongside other fabulous poets. To be in good company; to feel that their good poems make your poems look good; to catch the resonances between and among them; this is gratifying enough without a ranking system.

“That said, I was asked to single out a poem for special praise, and I chose ‘Armageddon à la Rockwell’ because it takes on a difficult subject with a surprising angle of attack. Told in the third person, using terse, sometimes even flat language, it juggles an abundance of vivid, telling details in a short space. It notices everything, and editorializes very little. It is subtly satirical—how ironic that the (maybe dying?) mother must celebrate her and her country’s birthday on the same evening (is there an implication that the country is also approaching its termination?); how droll that the host is British, with a fridge full of Peroni; how quaint that the grandparents are bickering over their Hiroshima trip while the sky is ‘burning’ with fireworks. The banality of the all-American family cook-out cuts against the dread induced by the sick mother and her lack of appetite, her nosebleeds. Without undue poeticizing, the poet conveys a true sense of despair.

“At the end of the poem, I circled back to reassess the title, the epigraph from Nietzsche. The word ‘loving’ leaps out. Since nothing in the poem seems loving at first, it starts to dawn on me that all the emotional weight of the language rests on the turn from ‘the mother’ at the start of the poem to the more personal ‘Mom’ in the last stanza. A chink in the poet’s stoic armor. And yet the flat, formally casual tone (that devastatingly deceptive ‘on occasion’ in the last line) keeps the horror at bay. The control and balance in the poet’s tone—the suppressed fury at the ‘chittering’ in the face of inevitable loss—is magnificent and true.”

—Author and Distinguished Professor of Poetry Ange Mlinko

“A Winter Sickness” by Eluney Gonzalez — The Palmetto Prize for Prose

“A whole marriage is telegraphed in these few pages, which are mysterious and moving. Stories this short must pack a punch, and in the last paragraph, this one packs a wallop of a punch.”

—Author and Distinguished Professor of English David Leavitt

“Who #3” by Maggie E. Kiley — The Autumn Blossom Prize for Art

“I am choosing ‘Who #3’ for the Almond Blossom Prize for Art. Who #3 is a print of an series of eight bust figures against at textured background. One of the most interesting things about this piece is how it hovers between abstraction and representational imagery. The profile of each bust is composed of strips of subtracted color and texture from the background giving us the shape of a figure. Glimpses of realized facial features float in and out view. This gives the work a sense of movement and progression as your eyes travel from one figure to the next. This piece’s use of repetition and color is a cause for more looking. Four figures use contrast with a warm red and maroon and stacked on four with a cooler blue and green on the bottom. There is a vibrant yellow and white in all figures that create a sense of harmony. Conceptually this piece makes me think of one’s identities as they shift throughout time and what is that relationship with our humanity and how we relate to one another.”

—Distinguished Professor of Assistant Professor of Drawing in the Expanded Field Antoine Williams

TEA XXV

“Vermin” by Eddie Bonilla — Blackbird Prize for Poetry

The shortlisted poems are a harsh bunch, and in the best way. It’s high time for a new generation of rebels and disaffected. (Gone are the times young was synonymous with carefree.) As Brecht had it, in his poem ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (“To Those Born Later”): ‘Truly, I live in dark times!/ The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead/ Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs/ Has simply not yet had/ The terrible news.’

Two are convincing adaptations of the Vallejo/Justice classic ‘I will die...’ The others are fraught, anxious, perturbed. All had something. I especially liked the confiding ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Considering Sound’, the freer of the ‘Black Stone, White Stone’ versions, which to me had something of Weldon Kees. My winner, though, is the furious logomachic chant called ‘Vermin’:

dull-eyed abundant advertisements
claim they’re understanding me,
or championed me, could pamper me,
if I deigned them stomp their stamp on me,
but I was oversiglized.

But congratulations to all. Bonne continuance.

—Michael Hofmann, Professor, Poet of One Lark, One Horse, and this year’s Poetry Prize judge.

“Farther than Where I Started” by Alec Kissoondyal — Palmetto Prize for Prose

Like its protagonist, Farther Than Where I Started is equal parts understated and unhesitating. Propelled by the author’s impressive sense for the fractal rhythms of sentence, detail, image, and narrative, the story hits you like a bullet. What kills you, though, isn’t the flashy percussion of first impact, but the gurgling ambiguity of exsanguination. Reason and language fail, leaving you defenseless against the primacy of sensation: the “psychedelic smear” of the landscape, the “obsidian spear” of the asphalt, and the “pop” the narrator can’t quite call a gunshot. Indeed, there’s so much the narrator never gets to say, and so much—their husband, their stolen hotel Bible, themself—that they never get to understand. In Farther Than Where I Started, this is the real horror: that our lives are too short for us to figure them out.

—James Eschrich, former Tea Prose Editor, PhD candidate, and this year’s Prose Prize judge.

"Find Me in the Shadows 1" by Bailey McDonald — Ghost Orchid Prize for Photography

When I view Find Me In The Shadows, my eye immediately goes to work - bouncing around the photograph and the multiple exposures it took to form it.

I enjoy the tension in the contrast that only the black-and-white medium can afford. It is balanced nicely with the calmness of clouds and predictability of power lines.

The inclusion of a human element - or the illusion of one - draws a connection between the photograph and the viewer. The piece is sophisticated and thought provoking. The multiple layers leave me with questions - as great art should.

-Daron Dean, practitioner of photojournalism and this year's Photography Award judge.

"Votive Tree" by Rosemary Matthews — Almond Blossom Prize for Art

Votive Tree floats in a liminal space that allows us to travel between realism and abstraction. We are never fully planted in one or the other, which is what makes this piece so dynamic. This piece serves as object, body, and landscape all at once. Even though the composition is symmetrical, Votive Tree has movement through mark making which has the potential to elicit strong feelings or memory. It has notes of painters Cicely Brown and Joan Mitchell. The conversation between warms of the reds, yellow and oranges and the cools of the blues and purples gives this piece a wonderful sense of depth. Votive Tree itself is an offering, giving us a beautiful array form, color, and emotion.

-Antoine Williams, interdiscipinary artist, UF Professor of Drawing and this year's Art Award judge.

TEA XIV

“Letters and Latkes” by Michael Sullivan — The Palmetto Prize in Prose

Tea considers all prose published in an issue for the Palmetto Prize. Padgett Powell-author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood, among other important works, and recipient of numerous awards, including a Prix de Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters-judged this year's contest. He selected Michael Sullivan's piece for the prize. "Letters and Latkes' delivers the small compulsions that make a boy like me want to read it," Powell said. "I'd roll with Mr. Frog."

The recipient will have his name displayed on a plaque in UF's English Department, along with all the other winners since Tea XIV. Earlier this academic year, Michael talked about his literary inspirations on Tea Party, the Tea-sponsored podcast. Listen to season one, episode three for more on the writer, available on all streaming platforms.

"Feminism, Again" by Nicole Alberto — The Blackbird Prize in Poetry

Dr. Kevin Knudson established this prize in 2012. Named after Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the award has evolved from exclusively considering the published poems of UF honors students to considering all poetry in an issue. The recipient of various honors, including a Cholmondeley Award and an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, poet and translator Michael Hofmann judged this year's Blackbird Prize. For it, he chose two honorable mentions: "An Eighth Sacrament" by K. Molnar and "The Beast" by Laurie Griffith.

This year's winner is "Feminism, Again" by Nicole Alberto. "It is a wonderfully orderly, dry, and evocative account of a woman's role in society throughout history," Hofmann wrote. "Evolving, unevolving-to use the kind of balance espoused by the poem itself. Each stanza, in 30 or 40 words, adumbrates an entire epoch. The reader is put in mind of Virginia Woolf's Orlando-or at least half of it. The poem is economical without being schematic; harsh without being bare. Curt lines alternate with picturesque and richly caesura'd longer lines:

'they bear children' or 'elbow grease' with 'philosophers ramble on and on, and they listen in passing,' 'Mary Shelley has a nightmare; Charlotte Bronte has a vision.

The trenchant ending is both surprising and inevitable."