In Response to My Mother When She Says Hearing Me Read My Writing’s like Hearing God
“God // cannot be remission, the clear scan, a bell’s clang after my / last treatment.”
Victoria Flanagan
—1st Place Winner of the Emerging Poet Prize and $3000—
Victoria C. Flanagan holds a dual-genre MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she was a Claudia Emerson Memorial fellow, a Carole M. Weinstein fellow, and where she served as managing editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Her writing has been awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the 2017 Thomas B. Gay Graduate Poetry Award, and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, among other honors. Flanagan’s work has appeared most recently in The Academy of American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, and RHINO. She currently serves as Poetry and Nonfiction reviews editor of Blackbird, where her reviews appear regularly. She teaches writing in central Washington.