It is with great pleasure that we announce the winner of our 2024 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award, Marjorie Buettner, for her chapbook collection “Dakota Dreaming.”
Marjorie (Junkert) Buettner, born in Bismarck, North Dakota, is an American Pushcart Prize–nominated, award-winning haiku, haibun, tanka, and sijo poet. Her work has been published throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., and she has won prizes in the James W. Hackett International Award for Haiku (2000 and 2003), the Harold G. Henderson Awards (2002, 2004, 2007, and 2011), the Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Award (2003, 2004, 2005), the Robert Frost Poetry Festival (2008 and 2009), and the Kusamakura Haiku Competition (2006), among others. She has taught haiku and tanka at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and presented poetry workshops throughout Minnesota. She is a former editor for the online journal Contemporary Haibun Online, and she frequently writes book reviews for haiku and tanka journals. Seeing It Now, a collection of haiku and tanka, appeared in 2008; her collection of haibun, Some Measure of Existence (2014), won first place in the Mildred Kanterman Merit Book Awards and was also nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. Buettner lives in Chisago City, Minnesota.
In keen competition, thirty-eight submissions for this year’s POPP Award were narrowed down to six finalists. As seen in this photo, they are, clockwise from top left: Carol Kapaun Ratchenski (ND), “A Place Made of Space”; Caroline Wellman (IL), “Just Before Sunrise”; Steve Gerson (KS), “There Is a Season”; Carmen Dressler Ward (NC), “Rhythms in the Wind”; Buettner; Lance Nixon (SD), “Round the Sun’s Paddock: A Prairie Year.”
Our finalist judge, Brendan Stermer (winner of the 2023 POPP Award with Forgotten Frequencies and finalist in the 2024 Midwest Book Awards), had this to say about Buettner’s manuscript:
“Dakota Dreaming” returns us to the ancient core of poetry as spiritual quest. But this book offers no standard hero’s journey – no daring descent into the underworld, no triumphant, hopeful return. It offers, rather, a gathering of visions received by one who has learned to dwell indefinitely in the liminal space between realms. While much of the collection is written in the Japanese haibun form, Buettner’s imagery is rooted deep in North American prairie soil. Her poems are like “abandoned houses which let the gold of afternoon light filter in through open windows,” offering some brief, imperfect respite for “those of us who have lost our way.” And when the daylight fades and the darkness becomes complete, Buettner guides us: “I borrow the light / of snow.”
As our 9th POPP Award winner, Buettner will receive our standard university press publishing contract, $400 ($200 for winning, $200 for serving as our next finalist judge), ten comp copies, 50 percent author discount, and national distribution. Her chapbook will be letterpress printed in fall 2024 at The Hunter Times (located at Bonanzaville in West Fargo) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum (located in Braddock, North Dakota). For more information about the POPP Award and our letterpress printing projects, check out this previous NDSU Press story, Land of Sunlit Ice, and this video: Thunderbird and The Land of Sunlit Ice, produced by Sandbagger News.
With congratulations to all six finalists and Marjorie Buettner, and with appreciation to all the poets who submitted their work, we invite poets to consider submitting their manuscripts to next year’s POPP Award competition (January 17 through March 17, 2025). We do not charge an entry fee.