The Prairie Schooner Book Prize

After ten years of selecting great books from writers, new and established, Prairie Schooner celebrates the first decade of its Book Prize series by offering this collection of excerpts from each years winners in fiction and poetry. Writers such as Brock Clarke, Anne Finger, Rynn Williams, and Paul Guest open windows to ordinary and fantastic experience showcasing the liveliness and power of contemporary literature. Greg Hrbeks darkly comic, genre-bending tales stand alongside Ted Gilleys stories about achieving bliss through pain and John Keebles reflections on community and the difficulty of love. Here Shane Books poems serve as an elegiac witness to suffering, while Kathleen Flennikens poems consider ordinary women constructing their own significance, and Kara Canditos explore sex, loss, and human passions. Whether the topic is fantastic or quotidian, childbirth or monsters, South American airplane disaster or suburban Wisconsin, this writing carries us to the furthest reaches of human experience.