announcing the winner of the 2024 dzanc poetry prize
Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Dzanc Books Prize Prize: Dispatch from Every Second Guess by Megan Gannon. This year’s finalists were read and evaluated by our guest judges, Keith Taylor (All the Time You Want) and Jonathan Fink (Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart). In addition to publication by Dzanc in Spring 2026, the prize also comes with a $1,000 advance.
“In Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon skillfully interweaves structural and aesthetic innovation with layered narrative depth and propulsive energy,” Fink says. “The repetition of the dispatch form reinforces the paradoxes of time, memory, and emotion—how within the sequence of days, some experiences fade while others strengthen and haunt.”
Megan Gannon holds degrees from Vassar College, the University of Montana, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The author of Cumberland (a novel), White Nightgown (a poetry collection), and The Witch’s Index (a poetry chapbook), her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Meridian, Calyx, The Pinch and The MacGuffin, among others. She is an Associate Professor of English at Ripon College in Wisconsin.
“Dispatch from Every Second Guess is the memoir-in-verse that I didn’t want to write but couldn’t help writing,” Gannon said. “I didn’t want to write poems that chronicled the ways I’d hurt or been hurt by others any more than I wanted to live through those hurts. But I looked around me and couldn’t find a book written by a divorced adoptive-mother/undiagnosed poet-teacher that burned through a world of conflicting, caging messages like the blowtorch I needed. As a middle-aged woman, I needed poems that weren’t graceful, wise, or resigned. I’ve tried to turn the very precise, potentially isolating particulars of my twenty-first century existence into something a reader might need to hear (or, at the very least, into a story I could live with).”
The Dzanc Books Poetry Prize was created to recognize daring, original, and innovative writing. Dzanc Books is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization not only committed to producing quality literary works but providing creative writing instruction in public schools through the Dzanc Writers-in-Residence program and offering low-cost workshops for aspiring authors. Dzanc Books also runs annual prizes for the novel and nonfiction. For more information on the house, upcoming titles, and other prize winners, please visit www.dzancbooks.org.