POPP Award Winners

Surrender Dorothy’s earliest poems were born out of a desire to understand the author's place within the larger context of the Midwest and Kansas, and—thinking beyond borders—the Plains ecoregion.

From the author:

What does it mean to be a child of this particular area, filled as it is with ancient prairie land, its cultural associations, folks espousing “Midwestern Nice,” so much overlooked native wildlife, and acres upon acres of Big Agriculture? I found myself drawn to Wizard of Oz characters as a case study, they being so recognizable to people both inside and outside the region. There were layers of privilege to peel back, along with all of the backyards and pastures I’d come to know since my youth, and moments of thinking deeply about my ancestors (animal, plant, and otherwise) and their relationship with the same land. I needed to know more about that past so I could better understand my present, if we can ever locate such a thing.

My goal as a writer is to faithfully represent the voices and characters and narratives of a particular area. That representation can manifest in any number of ways, and so much of Surrender Dorothy arose within a surrealist vein since its messages related to climate change and apathy have nowhere else to turn. The poems are often dark and stark, but I think I achieved what I set out to do over the course of the poems being written.

About the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award:

Every January 17 through March 17, NDSU Press accepts chapbook-length poetry collections about life on the plains and prairies or North America. Surrender Dorothy is the seventh winner of our annual award. The winning collection is copyedited and letterpress printed by the Introduction to Publishing class at North Dakota State University. Each chapbook is hand-assembled and individually numbered. Each POPP Award chapbook is a unique, limited-edition publication.

POPP Award winners to date are:

• 2022 Surrender Dorothy, by Brett Salsbury (Nevada)
• 2021 Prairie Madness, by Katherine Hoerth (Nebraska)
• 2020 A Muddy Kind of Love, by Carolyn A. Dahl (Texas)
• 2019 Harvest Widows, by Nick Bertelson (Iowa)
• 2018 Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger (North Dakota)
• 2017 Thunderbird, by Denise Lajimodiere (North Dakota)
• 2016 Land of Sunlit Ice, by Larry Woiwode (North Dakota)

About a year ago, Katherine Hoerth moved to Nebraska from Texas; her poems chronicle the experience of adjusting to life on the Great Plains amid the isolation and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. The term "prairie madness" feels, Hoerth observes, particularly fitting as it was once used to describe the "madness" of women pioneers of Nebraska and Kansas who endured extreme isolation.

Hoerth is an assistant professor of English at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press. Her work has been published in journals such as The Georgia Review and Valparaiso Review. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and in 2015 she won the Helen C. Smith Prize for the best book of poetry in Texas.

Prairie Madness is the sixth volume of our Poetry of the Plains & Prairies letterpress chapbook series. Each copy is unique, with hand-assembled pressed flowers.

A young girl dreams of becoming a circus performer and riding pink elephants in a sequined gown. A young boy hopes to use magic, a divining rod, to find his grandfather's trunk of gold buried on their land, so family stories say. But their exotic dreams eventually turn into the simpler life of farmers, though their simple life is never simple.

Their many stories are told in poems with achingly powerful expressive language in Carolyn Dahl's chapbook, A Muddy Kind of Love. Hand-letterpress printed, A Muddy Kind of Love is the 2020 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award winner.

Dakota Dreaming returns us to the ancient core of poetry a spiritual quest. But this book offers no standard hero's journey--no daring descent int the underworld, no triumphant, hopeful return. It offers, rather, a gathering of visions received by one who has learned to dwell indefinitely in the liminal space between realms. While much of the collection in written in the Japanese haibun form, Buettner's imagery is rooted deep in North American prairie soil. Her poems are like "abandoned houses that let the gold of afternoon light filter in through open windows," offering some brief, imperfect respite for "those of us who have lost our way." And when the daylight fades and darkness becomes complete, Buettner guides us: "I borrow the light / of snow."

--Brendan Stermer, author of Forgotten Frequencies (NDSU Press, 2023)

"Unflinching, attentive, both reverential and honest, the poems in Nick Bertelson's Harvest Widows address what it is to be midwestern."--James McKean, author of Headlong, Tree of Heaven, and We Are the Bus

Nick Bertelson is a fourth-generation farmer from southwestern Iowa. His poetry has appeared in Coe Review, Valley Voices, Prairie Fire, and North American Review, as a James Hearst Poetry Prize finalist.

Harvest Widows is the second chapbook to be published as NDSU Press’s annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award, and the fourth chapbook to be produced by publishing students on turn-of-the-twentieth-century hand-letterpress equipment.

"Expansive, full of grace and wit, meditation and mourning, Staiger's poetry accomplishes the difficult task of rendering a true portrait of her home, leaving in the grit alongside the sunflowers, the grime beside the larkspurs."--Amie Whittenmore, Glass Harvest

"A sense of place defines this book. Staiger reminds us that history is the lived experience of people in a distinct place...where weather matters and...the cycle of seasons mirrors the cycles of life."--Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Bonnie Larson Staiger is the first recipient of our Voices of the Plains and Prairies Poetry Award.