The Arkansas Writers MFA Program at the University of Central Arkansas is pleased to announce the winners of the Ninth Annual Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Awards.
Katie Hartsock’s book of poetry, Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press), won the award for poetry, while Amber Caron’s short story collection, Call Up the Waters (Milkweed Editions), won for prose. Each author will receive a monetary award and a trophy and in alternating years, one author also participates in Arkatext, an annual celebration of authors and writing organized by the UCA Creative Writing Program. This year Katie Hartsock will participate in Arkatext.
The Philip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award was founded in 2016 to promote recently published books and to honor central Arkansas author and literary advocate Phillip H. McMath, who selects the overall winner from finalists chosen by students in the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop. Past winners of the award include Jeff Fearnside, Alison Pelegrin, Laura Apol, Jen Fawkes, Katy Yocum, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Jennifer Steil, Brittani Sonnenberg, Rachel Hall and Caitlin Hamilton Summie.
Of Wolf Trees, McMath noted, “The most powerful symbols are those hidden in plain sight. In Katie Hartsock’s marvelous poetry collection Wolf Trees the central conceit is standing tall before us. What is a Wolf Tree? It’s an ancient anomaly among other, lesser trees, towering above in a kind of lonely but regal isolation. Katie says: ‘Don’t cut them down. And keep the worlds that keep them uncut.’ In her Wolf Trees, Hartsock utilizes personal experiences, myth and history to celebrate a human spirit that persists in the face of ultimate frailty and a parasitical technology that would cut it down into an image of itself.
Katie Hartsock shows us a symbol that we all need to see.”
Hartsock’s poems appear widely, in journals such as Ecotone, Threepenny Review, Pleiades, RHINO, and Image, and are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, At Length, and Iron Horse Literary Review. Her first poetry collection, Bed of Impatiens, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Originally from Youngstown, Ohio, she holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received the Hopwood Award, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University. She’s an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.
McMath offered the following words of praise for Amber Caron’s Call Up the Waters: “The shorter the prose the nearer it need be to perfection. Short stories only seem less demanding. Amber Caron’s collection of stories Call Up the Waters meets this challenge in every way. Not a word is wasted. Her language hits the mark in a brilliantly rendered prose that places us in the hearts of real people trapped in the hardness of an unforgiving world. In “The Stonemason’s Wife” an out-of-work husband obsessively draws ‘fireplaces and chimneys and stone walls.’ Hundreds of scraps are found in the trash, saved, spread out, as the desperate wife ‘tries to see what he sees.’ But to no avail. Nothing is ever built.
Caron’s is a world of imagination colliding with the stone-hard realities of natural indifference and failure. Her world is ours: flawed, intractable but rescued by poignant expression.”
Amber Caron is the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, PENAmerica Best Debut Short Stories, AGNI, Story, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at Utah State University and an assistant fiction editor at AGNI.
The 10th Annual Phillip McMath Post-Publication book awards are now open for books published in 2024. The deadline for the awards will be October 15, 2025 (postmarked). Find more information at arkansaswriters.wordpress.com.