2022 Honeybee Prize

Poetry:

Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His collection, Nebraska was published in 2019. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and George W. Holmes University Professor at the University of Nebraska.  He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  His awards include an Emmy, the Forward Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award and the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry. In 2021, Kwame Dawes was named editor of American Life in Poetry. In 2021, Dawes was nominated for the Neustadt Prize.

Stage & Screen

Charlene A. Donaghy is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, fiction writer, and producer with plays produced and/or awarded from New York City to Los Angeles, in Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Hansen Publishing Group publishes Charlene’s collection of writings Bones of Home and Other Plays. Other publications include Best American Short Plays (3x), She Persisted, Estrogenius-A Celebration of Female Voices (2x), Best 10-Minute Plays, 25* Ten-Minute Plays for Teens, In the Eye, Louisiana Literary Journal, and others. Charlene is Founder and Festival Director of the Warner International Playwrights Festival, Producing Consultant of the Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, and teaches writing for stage, screen, and fiction in the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska Omaha.  She is a founding member of Boston’s Proscenium Playwrights and a member of New York’s 9^th Floor Writers & Actors Collaborative, The Playwrights Center, Honor Roll!, and The Dramatists Guild of America where she served as inaugural Connecticut/Western New England Regional Representative. www.charleneadonaghy.com

Fiction:

Mary Kuryla is the author of the novel Away to Stay and the story collection Freak Weather, which was selected by Amy Hempel for the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories have received The Pushcart Prize and the Glimmer Train Short Fiction Prize and appeared in The Paris Review,  Conjunctions, Agni, Epoch, and elsewhere. Her award-winning shorts and feature films have premiered at Sundance and Toronto. She is a screenwriting and film studies professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Nonfiction:

Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (Counterpoint 2014), which was selected as a best debut book by the Indies Introduce New Voices program, the Indies Next List by the American Booksellers’ Association, named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Review. It received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, and reviewed nationally in print and on NPR—including twice in (O) Oprah Magazine—and was a finalist for the Vermont Book Award. She is also co-author of the textbook and anthology Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology along with the writer Sean Prentiss (Bloomsbury 2021). Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, North American Review, The Rumpus, The Carolina Quarterly, Columbia Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, Drunken Boat and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. More at jessicahnelson.com.