The Scholarship Committee of the College of Liberal Arts has completed the judging for the Keene Prize in Literature and is pleased to announce the 2024 Keene Prize goes to Laurel Faye for an excerpt from her novel Seal, Wife.
The generous bequest of E.L. Keene for the College of Liberal Arts allows for the early recognition of budding writers who create “the most vivid and vital portrayal of the American experience in microcosm.” The distinguished judging committee for 2024 consisted of Texas Poet Laureate ire’ne lara silva, Professor Peter Carpenter (Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance), Robert Devens (Director of the University of Texas Press), and English Department chair John Morán González.
The award for this year’s prize was $70,000. Runner-ups were each awarded $40,000.
Laurel Faye is a writer from Georgia. Her work has appeared in Foglifter, Sonora Review, Bahr, and elsewhere. She is a third-year poet with the New Writer’s Project MFA at UT Austin. She received the 2024 Keene Prize for Literature for an excerpt from her novel Seal, Wife, which explores the fraught relationships between mythology, landscape, and the female body.
The runners up (in alphabetical order):
Darius Atefat-Peckham is a poet and writer from Huntington, West Virginia and is currently a first year poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Mizna, The Kenyon Review, The Journal, Rattle and elsewhere. Atefat-Peckham is the editor of his mother’s, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s, posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023). His debut collection of poetry, Book of Kin, won the Autumn House Poetry Prize and will be published in late 2024.
Ira Goga is a trans poet and biochemist whose work has received recognition from The Academy of American Poets, the Ucross Foundation, and Frontier Poetry. They were named a finalist for the 2024 Keene Prize for their collection Road Work, which navigates the safety and violence of passing as male while journeying through America.
Kyle Okeke is a writer from Sugar Land, Texas. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, and Foglifter, and he was awarded the Evaristo Prize for African Poetry. He was named a finalist for the 2024 Keene Prize for his chapbook of poetry A Door in the Snow. He is a first year poet with the New Writer’s Project MFA at UT Austin.