To quote Solmaz Sharif, who selected Cawley’s manuscript as the winner of our 18th Annual Book Prize:

Stephanie Cawley’s My Heart But Not My Heart, I want to say, is a book of refusals. The losses and grief that refuse language, the poet’s own refusal of certain performances, the poem’s refusal of expected forms, the speaker’s refusal to slap a manicure on and understand it as self-care, despite the therapist’s best intentions. It is in part about the ways in which our refusals, and our passivity, brought about often by external forces and pressures are then pathologized, medicated, explained away in the dismal language of diagnosis.

Stephanie Cawley is the author of My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions, 2020), chosen by Solmaz Sharif as winner of the Slope Book Prize, and Animal Mineral (forthcoming YesYes Books, 2021). Her chapbook A Wilderness was selected by Khadijah Queen as winner of the Gazing Grain Press All-Genre Chapbook Contest. A poet from southern New Jersey, she holds a B.A. in literature from Stockton University and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh.