The 2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize
Congratulations, Julia Shipley!
We are pleased to announce that Julia Shipley has won the
2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize for her collection The Academy of Hay. 
Julia Shipley is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Herd (2010), winner of the Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Award and Planet Jr. (2012), winner of the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award, and First Do No Harm (Honeybee Press, 2014), as well as newly released prose collection, Adam's Mark: Writing From the Ox-House (Plowboy Press, 2014). Her essays and poems have been included in Wildbranch: an Anthology of Nature, Environment and Place-based Writing (University of Utah, 2010) and Fields of Learning (University Press of Kentucky, 2011), as well as appearing in variety of journals including CutBank, FIELD, Fourth Genre, Green Mountains Review, Hunger Mountain, Orion, Poetry, Poet Lore, Poetry East, The Rumpus, The Toast, Taproot, Terrain.org, USA Today, and Verse Daily. She is a two-time recipient of grants from the Vermont Community Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council and has also received fellowships from the Frost Place (NH), the Center for Books Arts (NYC), and The Studios at Key West (FL). A born-again agrarian, she raises animals and vegetables on her six-acre farm in Northern Vermont. More information about Julia can be found at Writing on the Farm.
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Two Eggs
This one the color
of my shoulder in winter,
and this one, my shoulder in summer.
No seam no pock no
porthole, smooth as oil.
The surface curve:
just a tip and a buttock,
silent as a horn in the trunk,
how many times can we give
what’s formed inside us—
never? Always? Once?
From The Academy of Hay, to be published by Bona Fide Books in 2015.
~•~
2014 Finalists
Britton Shurley, Our Given World
Susan Cohen, A Different Wakeful Animal
Bona Fide Books thanks the winner, finalists, and all poets who entered
the 2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize.
The 2015 submission period is June 1-Aug. 31.