POPP Award Winners

"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.