American Radiance (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, American Radiance, at turns funny, tragic, and haunting, reflects on the author’s experience immigrating as a child to the United States from Ukraine in 1991. 

What does it mean to be an American? Luisa Muradyan doesn’t try to provide an answer. Instead, the poems in American Radiance look for a home in history, folklore, misery, laughter, language, and Prince’s outstretched hand. Colliding with the grand figures of late ’80s and early ’90s pop culture, Muradyan’s imagination pushes the reader forward, confronting the painful loss of identity that assimilation brings.

Luisa Muradyan is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston and editor in chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her poems have been published in Poetry International, Paris-American, Blackbird, Ninth Letter, West Branch, and the Los Angeles Review, among other publications.