The winner of the 2022 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, Jenny Mitchell, will read her winning poem When Our Mother Dies along with a selection of her other work on 20th May 2023 at the Cork International Poetry Festival. We have also highlighted the first, second and third prize winners as well as finalists (whose poems will appear in the next issue of Southword) and highly commended entries below. The judge Suji Kwock Kim selected these poems from over 1900 entries.
First Prize
When Our Mother Dies by Jenny Mitchell
London, England
Jenny Mitchell won the Poetry Book Awards in 2021 for her 2nd collection, Map of a Plantation, which is on the syllabus at Manchester Metropolitan University. The best-selling debut collection, Her Lost Language, is One of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 (Poetry Wales), and her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man, is a Poetry Kit Book of the Month. She has won several competitions and is widely-published.
Second Prize
Burying Grandfather by Yesol Kim
New York, USA
Yesol Kim is a student of literature. She lives in New York.
Third Prize
Never by Judith H. Montgomery
Oregon, USA
Judith H. Montgomery’s poems appear in the Bellingham Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Poet Lore, among other journals. She’s been awarded several residencies and fellowships. Her chapbook Passion received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her second full-length collection, Litany for Wound and Bloom, appeared in 2018. Her prize-winning narrative medicine chapbook, Mercy, appeared from Wolf Ridge Press in 2019.