A Brief History of Fruit by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews wins 2018 Akron Poetry Prize

Diane Seuss, this year’s judge, has chosen A Brief History of Fruit by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews of Chestertown, Maryland as the 2018 Akron Poetry Prize winner. The contest received a total of 687 entries in 2018.

In A Brief History of Fruit, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s full-length debut, we are shuttled between the United States and the Philippines in the search for a sense of geographical and racial belonging. Driven by a restless need to interrogate the familial, environmental, and political forces that shape the self, these poems are both sensual and cerebral: full of “the beautiful science,” as she puts it, of “naming: trees of one thing, then another, then yet another.” Colonization, class dynamics, an abiding loneliness, and a place’s titular fruit—tiny Filipino limes, the frozen berries of rural America—all serve as focal markers in a book that insists that we hold life’s whole fragrant pollination in our hands and look directly at it, bruises and all.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet, literary critic, and the author of BETWEEN, winner of the 2017 New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press. A two-time Academy of American Poets prize winner and a Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared widely, including in Poetry Northwest, Grist, West Branch, Nat. Brut, The Shallow Ends, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and elsewhere, and have been selected for inclusion in Bettering American Poetry. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. She lives in Maryland and teaches at Washington College, and you can find her on Twitter at @kqandrews.