STEEL TOE BOOKS 2021 BOOK AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT
Steel Toe Books is excited to announce our Steel Toe Books Poetry Award Winner selected by judge Kelli Allen and our Steel Toe Books Prose Award Winner selected by judge Brian Leung. The titles will receive publication in Fall 2022. Congratulations to our shortlist and longlist authors, and thank you to all of the authors that submitted to the prize. The 2022 Steel Toe Books Poetry and Prose (fiction and nonfiction) Awards for full-length books will open January 1, 2022.
​
POETRY WINNER
Amy Roa Radioactive Wolves
​
SHORTLIST
Preeti Vangani Home Science
Freesia McKee This is Not a Recession
David Moolten The Moirologist
​
LONGLIST
Dion Oreilly Sadness of the Apex Predator
Alan Soldofsky Charts (For the End of Days)
mark millicent The Other side of Rabbit Island
Helene Eisman Fisher STERILE FIELD
Laurie Uttich Stripped for Parts
Zein El-Amine A Travel Guide For The Exiled
Rex Ybañez Antithesis
T.J. DiFrancesco A Catfish that Eats Dogs
Jennifer Anne Moses Domesticity
Lee Landau Drowning at the Source
William Notter Buying the Farm
Carol Krause Tending the Wasteland
​
PROSE WINNER
Jen Knox We Arrive Uninvited
​
SHORTLIST
Catherine Gammon The Gunman and the Carnival
Scott Shibuya Brown Story by Erasmus Yang
Maggie Smith (Nye?) Bad Days
Nancy Ludmerer A Simple Case, Stories
​
LONGLIST
Joanna Acevedo Smoke Signals
Garrett Ashley My Grandterh Ran Off
Leslie Grover Jim Crows...
John Whalen Mighty Soldier of the Moon
Patricia Schultheis Something Sensed; Someone Summoned
Joan Frank Juniper Street
LN Lewis DOUBT
Suzanne Manizza Roszak Brutal Noises
Jacqueline Vogtman Girl Country
Phillip Mandel The Get and Other Stories
Jessica Barksdale Accepted Forms of Ruin
Rob Magnuson Future of British Seaweeds
​
CITATIONS
​
Kelli Allen's Citation on Amy Roa's Radioactive Wolves
In “Axolotl,” the opening poem of Amy Roa’s Radioactive Wolves, we are told that the narrator “never got really good at building heavily armored beasts.” The joy in this line is in its un-truth. The poems in this collection are a magnificent assemblage of creatures, armored and tender, toothed and tender-gummed. Roa is a master at breathing new shapes from familiar biological casts so that the emerging menagerie is a bestiary bridging the possible with the fantastical. She blends the vertical and mythic with the literal and grotesque to place animals within and on the edges of environments we all too often take for granted. Roa is as much architect of biology as she is spell-caster. There is terror in these poems, and an extraordinary reverence for the natural world and our unnatural reactions to animals occupying spaces far more ancient than our own.
​
In the collection’s title poem, Roa asserts “All my dreams take place in a house I’ve never been to.” Roa’s imagery elides genus into the uncategorical, and the resulting structure for containment is beyond naming. As the poems progress Roa is essentially building a new alchemy—one for all living things that might nest on inside another. In these pages, the sources for sound and touch are slick and furred, mutated and morphed. What we may think is a mongoose, is Jupiter in disguise. The compass Roa offers her readers does not point in any directions we might recognize. Instead, she demands we give new names to the spaces we train our eyes and for the animals we find taking-up residence in our dining rooms and in our dreams. These are not poems and stories for the shy or timid—they are whole portraits to be studied close, without blinking, without minding what nips and nuzzles in the viewing.
​
Radioactive Wolves, is simply, a marvel. There is a new cosmology being inked into the ground with every animal, planet, mineral, and history laid bare in this collection. I will be returning to the wildness in these pages again and again, wishing for us all to “sit here quietly, watch something shiny take off in the distance after it leaves the contents of its voice at your feet.”
Citation on Jen Knox's We Arrive Uninvited
​
Citation forthcoming.