From Our Soundbooth | June 04, 2015

This week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to feature another winner of our  2015 Miller Audio Prize Contest.  The winning poetry submission was Kevin McIlvoy’s “Notes on his poems by a guy who observed them in their natural habitat.”

McIlvoy has published four novels (A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop) and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and many other literary magazines. His short-short stories and prose poems have appeared in The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cortland Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, Waxwing, and other online literary magazines. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He has taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing since 1990; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1981 to 2008. He has served as a fiction faculty member at national conferences, including the Ropewalk Writing Conference (Indiana), the Rising Stars Writing Conference (Arizona State University), the Writers at Work (Utah) Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writing Conference (Vermont). He has been a manuscript consultant for University of Nevada Press, University of Arizona Press, University of New Mexico Press and other publishers. He served on the Board of Directors of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. His collection of prose poems, short-short stories and short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, will be published by Four Way Books in 2017.

Check back in the weeks to come for our other winners in humor and audio documentary and for the runners up in each category.  And don’t forget about our fall Contest, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, with winners in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction each receiving an award of $5,000.

We hope you enjoy our winner in poetry, “Notes on his poems from a guy who observed them in their natural habitat,” by Kevin McIlvoy.