The Missouri Review Presents the 2024 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’

Prize Winner in Poetry

The Missouri Review will host award-winning poet Amanda

Gunn at Sager Reeves Gallery, Saturday, April 26 from 6 to 8 p.m.

TMR editor-in-chief Speer Morgan notes her ability to write about grief and

death: “Gunn, winner of this year’s Editors’ Prize for poetry, knows that the

loss of a loved one can have a displacing, estranging effect; grief sets us

apart, but it can also bring us closer to people in unexpected ways.”

The event, located at 105 East Walnut Street, will include a reading by Gunn

followed by a reception. It is free and open to the public.

Gunn will read selections from her work featured in the Spring 2025 issue of

the Missouri Review as well as excerpts from her debut collection, Things I

Didn’t Do With This Body, published by Copper Canyon in 2023.

Gunn is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard, where she studies Black

poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books

Quarterly Journal, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere.

The event is sponsored in part by the City of Columbia Office of Cultural

Affairs.

The Missouri Review is a not-for-profit organization made possible in part by

the generous support of readers and donors. The magazine has helped shape

the contemporary literary scene by offering the finest work of today’s most

important writers and by discovering the brightest new voices in fiction, non fiction and poetry.