Day Eight is pleased to announce that poet Sara Grace Smith has been awarded the 2024 Luce Prize. The Luce Prize recognizes an exceptional poet in their first four years of professional publication and is selected by the chair of the editorial board of Day Eight’s literary magazine, the Mid-Atlantic Review.
Reflecting on her award, Smith wrote, “As a new writer, at times, it can be daunting to find the motivation to keep writing and submitting when I am just one voice in this huge sea of talent. This is, without a doubt, a great encouragement.”
The annual Luce Prize was established by the Day Eight board of directors in January 2023 to honor the organization’s outgoing board chair, Gregory Luce, a longtime champion of new poets. Gregory Luce served as board chair of Day Eight from 2017 to 2022 and as lead poetry editor for the entity’s literary magazine in the same period. He continues to serve in the position of editorial board chair following the magazine’s 2021 editorial board expansion and reorganization.
Considering Smith’s work the selector reflected, “A nurse by profession, Sara Grace Smith is also an emerging poet just beginning her publishing career. Her poems in The Mid-Atlantic Review demonstrate her skilled use of details to create a quiet but strong emotional resonance.”
Sara Grace Smith, from Nashville, Tennessee, works full time as an ICU nurse in Washington, D.C. When she isn’t working or writing poetry, she can be found at a yoga class or spending time with her five in their 1880s home. Still working on establishing herself as a writer, Sara mainly focuses her efforts on poetry but hopes to one day create a fiction series.
Smith received a $200 cash award and her winning poems will be published in the forthcoming 2024 Mid-Atlantic Review print issue annual alongside two honorable mentions for the award: Jim Smith and CanMan Tha Poet.
You can read Smith’s selected works in the Mid-Atlantic Review here. You can read a blog post about the inaugural, 2023 winner, Juliana Schifferes, here.