09/2018 – Julia Kolchinksy Dasbach (MFA Poetry ’13) has won the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize for her manuscript, The Many Names for Mother. Julia’s book will be published by the Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019 when she will also give a workshop and reading with contest judge Ellen Bass.  Congratulations, Julia!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old and grew up in Rockville, Maryland. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry about the Holocaust. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and TENT Conferences as well as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Julia is the author of the chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014) and her recent poems appear in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and TriQuarterly. She is Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine (www.constructionlitmag.com) and when not busy chasing her toddler around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she dabbles in writing a blog about motherhood (https://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/).