Out of 106 different poets and almost 400 poems submitted, final judge Jessica Jacobs selected “Not a Night Without a Line” by Vincent Joseph Kopp of Chapel Hill, NC as this year’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize winner.
Jacobs wrote, “Riffing off Pliney the Elder’s summary of the practice of the Greek painter Appelles– “Nulla dies sine linea,” not a day without a line, a proverb that has since been taken up by centuries of writers and artists– “Not a Night Without a Line” turns insomnia into both industry and inspiration. Leaping from rumination to memory to grief, these lines offer an artful mimesis of that restless leaping the mind does as we lie in bed desperate for sleep. And just as the speaker is haunted by memories of their dead parents, I am haunted by the poem’s final lines, where sleep is conflated with death and our artmaking is revealed as the vanitas it surely is even as these lines simultaneously make a case for poetry’s necessity by opening out into the larger field of concerns beyond the page and, in so doing, may perhaps outlive their maker.”
Vincent Joseph Kopp, MD is a writer and poet who is also a medical doctor certified in pediatrics and anesthesiology and an Episcopal priest. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals as varied as Crescent Review, DoubleTake, The Journal of Medical Humanities, Southern Cultures, Anesthesia and Analgesia, Christian Century, to name a few. In November 2023 The Curious Wife (Trefoil Press, 2023), was published as a limited edition of 100 copies for circulation among family and friends to mark 45 years of marriage to his wife Katherine Craft Kopp. As a faculty member at UNC Chapel Hill he taught a course called “Medical Ethics and Literature” and was a Chapman Fellow at Institute for the Arts and Humanities. While at UNC Chapel Hill he also helped students start two other journals focused on medicine and the humanities, iris and Health Humanities Journal. After retiring from medicine in 2016, he was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 2018 and served in North Carolina parishes for five years, retiring in 2023. He now devotes time to gardening, publishing poems, and assembling two books of poems.
Jacobs awarded 2nd place to “Upon First Meeting my Partner’s Children” by Jeni O’Neal, remarking, “With its epigraph from Wordsworth’s famous ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ ‘Upon First Meeting My Partner’s Children’”’ immediately places the speaker as a lonely, unrooted poet wandering among children bright and vibrant as Wordsworth’s daffodils.” O’Neal has a BFA from New York University, a JD from UNC Chapel Hill School of Law, and an MFA from UNC Greensboro’s Creative Writing program. She teaches and lives in North Carolina.
3rd place is awarded to Charles Murray’s poem “Rip Van Winkle at 70.” Jacobs noted, “With its collection of simple but clear embodied images, this poem also insists on not wasting time by railing against inevitable death but instead being fully present to even the smallest moments of our lives.” Charles Murray taught English at Western Carolina University then worked as a software developer for 36 years before rediscovering a writing vocation in retirement. He lives with his wife in Charlotte, NC.
Honorable Mentions go to last year’s Applewhite Prize winner Janis Harrington for “Seeking Salvation in the Sixties.” She co-hosts the Second Sunday Poetry Series at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. Honorable Mention also goes to “Black Is A Well II: Libation Reservoir” by one of this year’s Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize Honorable Mentions, Regina YC Garcia. She is an award-winning poet, Language Artist, and English Professor at Pitt Community College in Greenville, NC.
Other finalists were Michael Beadle, Joanne Durham, JoAnn Hoffman, Lucinda Trew, and Gideon Young.
We thank our NCLR poetry readers and Poetry Editor Jeff Franklin for all their hard work to choose finalists. All submissions are read blind as they pass through several preliminary stages before the final judge makes their choices. Thanks, too, to final judge Jessica Jacobs, author of three poetry collections: unalone; Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going; and Pelvis with Distance. She is also executive director and founder of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.
This is the thirteenth year for the Applewhite Poetry Contest, which is open to any NC poet who is a subscriber to NCLR or a member of the NC Literary and Historical Association. Honoraria for the prize winner, honoree, judge, and any other poets whose poems are accepted for publication are provided by NCLR and the NC NCLHA.
Produced since 1992 at East Carolina University, the North Carolina Literary Review has won numerous awards and citations. The mission of NCLR is to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture. NCLR introduces new and emerging writers; reintroduces forgotten authors; showcases work in literary criticism, interviews, book reviews, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; and reports on the state’s literary news.
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