Call for 2025 Balocating Undergraduate Prize Announced
January 30, 2025
The call for entries for the Balocating Undergraduate Prize for Poetry is now open with entries due February 28. The final judge is Airea D. Matthews and the winner will be announced on April 2, 2025, at Airea D. Matthews's reading at 7:00 p.m. in the RCAH Theater.
The Balocating Undergraduate Prize for Poetry was established in 2011 by Annie Balocating (1979-2018), an MSU/Residential Option in Arts and Letters (ROIAL) alumna. It awards $500 to an MSU undergraduate in any major for a single poem.
To view guidelines and to enter, click here.
About final judge Airea D. Matthews
Airea D. Matthews is the author of Bread and Circus (Simon and Schuster, 2023), which won the 2024 LA Times Book Prize, and her critically acclaimed debut Simulacra (YUP, 2017), which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores the topics of longing and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as, “Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.”
Bread and Circus is a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification through a personal lens. Of the collection, Gregory Pardlo noted: “With the genius and ferocity of mother love, Airea Matthews’s Bread and Circus shreds our expectations of what poems can be and do while clearing the air of the illusions that cloud our understanding of past, present, self and other. Lift the cover and breathe in the clarity concentrated on these pages.”
For her writing, Matthews earned a 2020 Pew Fellowship as well as the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poets, American Poet, The Rumpus, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Kresge Literary Arts Fellow, Matthews is a founding member of the transdisciplinary art studio The Teeth Factory.
Matthews holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an M.F.A. from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an M.P.A. from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. From 2022-2023 she served as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award.