The Missouri Review is pleased to announce the second annual Perkoff Prize, a tri-genre contest that awards $1000 and publication each to writers of the best story, set of poems, or essay that engage in evocative ways with health and medicine as judged by the editors.
The initial concept for the Perkoff Prize was as a post-publication award (much like TMR’s Peden Prize) that recognized literary excellence in a piece that had a meaningful connection to health and medicine. The original benefactor of this prize, the late Dr. Gerald Thomas Perkoff, was Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in the Department of Family and Community Medicine (learn more about his life here). His love of poetry and the possibilities in treating the vast, rich arena of human experience with health and medicine drove this desire to take note of and reward literary achievement. We started planning ways to reinvent and revitalize the prize in the late spring of 2019, with no idea what the following years would bring us. Now here we are, amidst a pandemic that has relentlessly revealed to us the precarity—and resourcefulness—of human health and the endeavors of medicine to relieve pain and suffering. It is our humble hope that the Perkoff Prize is an opportunity for the artful expression of these infinitely diverse and collectively resonant human experiences.
The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2022.
For more information and to submit your work, go to https://www.missourireview.com/contests/perkoff-prize/
