2023 Breakout! Writers Prize Winners
We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2023 BREAKOUT! WRITERS PRIZE, honoring distinct student voices in poetry and prose: Chelsea Dingman and Tzu Hsien (Charlene) Huang. We want to thank this year’s judges: Safiya Sinclair (poetry) and Meredith Westgate (prose). And thank you to everyone who submitted to this year’s Breakout! Writers Prize; the amount of talent we found was outstanding.
Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series (UGA Press, 2017). Her second book, through a small ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2020). Her third collection I, Divided, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.
Safiya Sinclair on Chelsa Dingman’s winning poem:
"Long after I’d first read this poem, it kept pulling me back. Each line moves and glows with music and mysteries, and the skin-closeness of the speaker's interiority. I was transfixed by its muscle and rigor, and the way Dingman presents the fractured history of the body and its trauma; the melancholic complexity and haunted desire of it."
Tzu Hsien (Charlene) Huang is in her final semester at Johns Hopkins University, in which she is pursuing a Writing Seminars and International Studies double major. She hails from Taipei, Taiwan, and now lives in Medford, MA.
Meredith Westgate on Tzu Hsien Huang’s winning story:
"I was haunted by Tzu Hsien Huang’s story, “Haven,” for days after reading. Huang writes the discomfort of the in-between so well, lingering in the space between reality and dreams, belonging and loneliness, comfort and escape, love and longing. I was also struck by the language, with descriptions that lull you along and then stop you cold. I can’t wait to see what Huang writes next!"
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