“Ghost Stories,” by Michael Collins and Annie Kim, is lovely and—appropriately enough—haunting, with the two voices echoing and playing off each other yet appearing seamless. Simultaneously dark and lyric, musical and surprising, it is everything I would look for in a collaborative sequence.
—Judge Ruth Foley

 

Ghost Stories by Michael Collins and Annie Kim

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Annie Kim’s first poetry collection, Cyclorama, won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Southern Indiana. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Mudlark, Asian American Literary Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowship, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service.

Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 50 journals and magazines, including Grist, Kenning Journal, Pank, and Smartish Pace. His first chapbook, How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water, won the Exact Change Press Chapbook Contest in 2014. A full-length collection, Psalmandala, was published later that year, and a second chapbook, Harbor Mandala, appeared in 2015. Visit www.notthatmichaelcollins.com for more.

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First Runner-up: “The Dose” by Lissa Kiernan & Kim Peter Kovac

Second Runner-up: “Old Man Blue Fairy” by Dustin Michael & Neesha Navare

Honorable Mention: “Every Day a New Death” by Lisette Alonso & Janelle Garcia

Read letter from our guest judge, Ruth Foley

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 About our Guest Judges

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two greyhounds, one of whom sometimes gets mistaken for a cow. Her work is easy to find online and in her chapbooks, Dear Turquoise (dancing girl press, 2013) and Creature Feature (ELJ Publications, 2015). She is easy to find at fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com or by looking at her sofa. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.

Patrick Shawn Bagley‘s debut crime novel Bitter Water Blues was published in January 2015 by Snubnose Press. His stories of hardscrabble life and rural mayhem have appeared in Crimespree Magazine, Thrilling Detective, Spinetingler, The Iconoclast, and the anthology Uncage Me. He was one of the founding editors of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, an annual anthology. Bagley lives and writes on a dead-end dirt road in a one-stoplight town. During the day, he works at a nonprofit community support program for adults with intellectual disabilities.

 

Need more? Read cahoodaloodaling‘s best of the best: 2015 Nominations