Bess Cooley won the 2017 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Breakwater Review, Ruminate, and Forklift Ohio among other journals. A graduate of Knox College and the MFA program at Purdue University, where she taught composition and creative writing and was Managing Editor of Sycamore Review, Cooley is currently an editorial reader at Spry and teaches writing at the University of Tennessee.