Acie Clark is the winner of the 2025 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize

Hub City Press is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2025 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize is Acie Clark. The prize for his unpublished manuscript, Small Talk, is $1,500 and publication by Hub City Press in fall 2024. His manuscript was selected as the winner of the prize by award-winning poet Derrick Austin.

Acie Clark is a writer from Florida and Georgia. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama where he worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor and as a farmhand at Snows Bend Farm. A former poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, he currently teaches in the Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing department at the University of Central Arkansas and as an Instructor at Interlochen Center for the Arts. His work is forthcoming in Salamander, Florida Anthology, Quarterly West, I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry, and The Arkansas International. Small Talk is his first book! 

Of the collection, Austin writes: "Attuned to the conversations we have with ourselves and each other, Small Talk recognizes the slipperiness of language as a means of self-discovery as well as self-deception: 'This is the kind of story that survives best in the South, / where facts fade as the details get more real, less true.' These poems are elemental. They gleam with a hard-won clarity, unafraid to reckon with public and personal histories as a trans man grieving a grandfather whose memory fades, negotiating a path toward sobriety, and seeking what is holy in a rural landscape keenly and movingly observed. In prose poems, prayers, and dreams, we hear a man coming into himself through birdwatching and gardening, testosterone and tarot. Reckoning with a fallible country and God, the phenomenal sonnet suite 'Faith Hill' concludes: 'I do, I still have some faith.' This poet is comfortable existing in doubt because that is where belief resides. Belief, like the body and natural world, is richer because it is ever evolving. Rebuking fixedness and inflexibility, Small Talk celebrates change with a spirit of play and generosity." 

Derrick Austin was born in Homestead, Florida. He received a BA from the University of Tampa and, in 2014, an MFA from the University of Michigan. He is the author ofTenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2021 Isabella Gardener Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016), selected by Mary Szybist for the 2015 A. Poulin Jr. Prize. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the recipient of fellowships from The Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing and Stanford University. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

The runner up for the prize this year is Delicia Daniels for Abolition Chronicles. 

The biennial New Southern Voices Prize is sponsored by Hub City Press of Spartanburg, S.C. It is open to all poets who have either never published a full-length collection of poetry, or who have only published one full-length collection, and who currently reside in and have had residency in one or more of the following states for a minimum of 24 consecutive months: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia.

The previous winner of this prize was Emilie Menzel for their collection The Girl Who Became a Rabbit which was released by Hub City Press in September 2024.