Joe Wilkins, associate professor of English at Linfield College, has won the 2018 Blue Lynx Prize for his poetry collection, “Thieve.”
Publisher Lynx House Press has run the book-length poetry contest since 1998. The prize comes with an award of $2,000 and publication of the winning manuscript.
Wilkins is the author of a memoir, “The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry,” winner of the 2014 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award and a finalist for the 2013 Orion Book Award. He has also authored three collections of poems: “When We Were Birds,” winner of the 2017 Oregon Book Award; “Notes from the Journey Westward,” winner of the 2013 High Plains Book Award; and “Killing the Murnion Dogs,” a finalist for the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize. His debut novel, “Fall Back Down When I Die,” comes out this spring.
A National Magazine Award finalist and Pushcart Prize winner, Wilkins’s poems, essays and stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Utne Reader, Ecotone, The Sun, Orion and Slate, among other magazines and literary journals.

