We are pleased to announce that our 2022 judge Natalie Diaz has selected a winner and two runners-up from a slate of finalists and semi-finalists for North American Review's 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize. Thank you to everyone who submitted poetry for the prize. We had 384 entries this year, and we enjoyed reading such an abundance of excellent poetry. The winner and runner-up will appear in the Spring 2022 issue of the North American Review, and all entrants will receive a copy.
First Place
“1997 Southside” — J.K. Tsosie
Runners-Up
“Sneaking Onto the Reservoir Again” — Robert Wood Lynn
“How An Oxbow Lake, My Daughter” — Elisabeth Preston-Hsu
Finalists
“The Boys Who Came Back” — Alice Templeton
“Equinox” — Matt Miller
“Chalcopyrite” — Michael Grabell
“The Baby Pig” — Shanan Ballam
“Medusa to Psappho” — Flower Conroy
“Cat in a Box” — Robert Wood Lynn
“The Fantastic Story of G and Her Tumor” — Alejandro Escude
“Lamentation of Butterfly Envelopes” — Amber Rose Crowtree
“At the Ashokan Watershed” — Madeleine Cravens
“A Boat Wrote a Letter” — Jonny Perez
“Ohio Elegy” — Roy Bentley
“Blood” — Christian Collier
“Prone “— Julio Diaz
“Afraid” — Maria Nazos
“Grits (and Love and Happiness)” — Greg Emilio
“Lost Sonata” — Lynne Thompson
About the Judge
Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.