Caitlin Scarano, Wren Poetry Prize Winner 2020
We are pleased to announce the winner for the Wren Poetry Prize: The Necessity of Wildfire by Caitlin Scarano, selected by award-winning poet Ada Limón, Blair’s poetry editor.
Limón wrote, “Hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous, The Necessity of Wildfire is a book that creates a humming musicality out of the early sorrows and rough stones of life. Cinematic and sound-driven, these are brilliant and honest personal poems that open up to the larger universal truths. These poems are gorgeous and complex.”
Though originally from the South, Scarano lives in Anacortes, Washington, and was selected as a 2018 participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. Scarano’s imagination is galvanized by the Pacific Northwest—floods and wildfires, the Salish Sea and the North Cascades, and the humans and animals whose lives intersect and collide there.
In these poems, the speaker chases a singular, thorny question: how does where and who we came from shape who and how we love? In this collection, the speaker reckons with a legacy of violence in her family, the death of her estranged father, the unraveling of relationships, the complexity of sexuality, and her decision not to have children.
Scarano holds a PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MFA in poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s the author of several chapbooks, including The Hatchet and the Hammer. Her debut collection of poems was Do Not Bring Him Water (2017). Her work has appeared in Granta, Entropy, Carve, and Colorado Review.
The Wren Poetry Prize, formerly known as Carolina Wren Press Poetry Prize, is awarded to a writer’s first or second full-length poetry collection. Blair will publish the winning collection in Spring 2022.