The Blog | The Iowa Review

Winners of the 2024 Veterans' Writing Contest

TIR Staff

The Iowa Review is thrilled to announce the winners and runners-up of our seventh Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans, judged by Dewaine Farria. The work of all winners and runners-up will be published in the Spring 2025 edition of TIR. Included below are the winners, Farria's comments on their winning work, and a biographical note about each writer. Our next veterans' writing contest will accept submissions in May 2026.

First Place:

TIR Editor Interview Series: Nicole Migneault

Nicole Migneault

Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate student and poetry co-editor Nicole Migneault answers a few questions about editing and poetry.

In your view, what’s the most important thing an editor should do, or read for when reviewing submissions?

Poems with a sense of urgency, emotional honesty, and ideally a singular approach to writing intrigue me. I think it’s important as an editor to uplift work that is immersive and holds me in the space of the poem with its unique sensibilities, specificity and attention to the line.

Woody

Todd Larkin Tremble

We're thrilled to announce that Todd Larkin Tremble has been selected as the 2024 winner of the David Hamilton Undergraduate Creative Writing Prize for his poem "Woody." This prize is sponsored by anonymous donors who wish to honor the mentorship and support that students at the University of Iowa received from Emeritus Professor of English David Hamilton. In addition to publication online, the award comes with a $500 scholarship.

My name was Woody,
my favorite dinosaur was the triceratops,
and my dad was going to live forever.

Winners of the 2024 Iowa Review Awards

TIR Staff

The results are in: we are very excited to announce the winners of the 2024 Iowa Review Awards! The work of the winners will be published in our Winter 2024/2025 issue. Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest, and a huge thank you to our contest judges: Sequoia Nagamatsu (fiction), Sarah Viren (nonfiction), and Terrance Hayes (poetry). Meet our winners:

FICTION

Winner: Valentina Rivera-Lies, “Ratones”

One Day for Iowa

TIR Staff

For the first time, The Iowa Review is participating in the University of Iowa's 24-hour giving campaign, One Day for Iowa, which takes place on Wednesday, March 27, 2024. We're asking for funding to continue our veterans' writing contest. Until 11:59 p.m. this Wednesday, donations can be made here.

For social media posts, we asked some recent winners for their thoughts on what the contest has meant to them, and the testimonials were so moving that we wanted to collect and preserve them in one place. Thank you for your support, Ashley Hand, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, James Janko, Libby Kurz, Adam Straus, Brian Kerg, and Erik Cederblom! (More testimonials are on the way, and we'll add them here as they come in.)

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