Read the 2022 Perkoff Prize-Winning Pieces
...and then submit your own!
The 2023 Perkoff Prize closes Monday, April 2. If you’ve been looking for a sign to submit, this is it! And if you’re looking for inspiration, scroll on down to the bottom of this post where you can access last year’s winning pieces for free.
Begun in 2021, the initial concept for the Perkoff Prize was as a post-publication award (much like TMR’s Peden Prize) that recognized literary excellence in a piece that had a meaningful connection to health and medicine. The original benefactor of this prize, the late Dr. Gerald Thomas Perkoff, was Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in the Department of Family and Community Medicine (learn more about his life here). His love of poetry and the possibilities in treating the vast, rich arena of human experience with health and medicine drove this desire to take note of and reward literary achievement. We started planning ways to reinvent and revitalize the prize in the late spring of 2019, with no idea what the following years would bring us. It is our humble hope that the Perkoff Prize is an opportunity for the artful expression of infinitely diverse and collectively resonant human experiences.
Winners in each genre win $1,000 and are published in our winter issue.
Poetry Winner: “Ferragosto” and other poems by Bridget O’Bernstein
“The body is the window the pain has flung/to call through its sound.”
Nonfiction Winner: “Incurable” by Faith Shearin
“I think sometimes of Emily Dickinson, who apparently preferred that the doctors who attended her speak to her from outside her bedroom door. I want a doctor who can help me think about my body as a metaphor, a doctor who can help me accept my mortality.”
Fiction Winner: “Pet Scents” by Dina Guidubaldi
“I want Dolores here so I can tell her, See? See all the beauty, despite all the ugly? See the way the moon and the sun hang together in the sky, giving us stupid, lying people all their light?”