Laura Minor won the 2020 John Ciardi Poetry Prize. Her debut book of poems, Flowers as Mind Control, is on BkMk Press/University of Arkansas Press. She was also a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and the winner of the 2019 ILA's Rita Dove Poetry Award.

Books by Laura Minor:

Other poems on the web by Laura Minor:
"Exiled in Palatka, FL"
"I Don't Camp Well"
"Nine-Dollar Bacon"
"Home State"
"Recidivism"
"In Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, the Eponymous Female Lead Survives"
Four poems
"Pocket Change"

Laura Minor's Website.

Laura Minor on Twitter.

About Flowers as Mind Control:

"One of the greatest pleasures I take in poetry is that feeling of camaraderie: the shared space of mutual humanity. That sense of belonging in the world, even with all its volatilities and uncertainties. And Laura Minor's poems deliver on that pleasure. Achingly real and ever aspiring, this book is full of wonder, full of longing and its rewards. 'I guess I just wanted to see snow falling from the sky,' she writes and 'I will open a small sea for you.' I find these poems so gratifying, so necessary. Tender and awake to what's possible."
—D.A. Powell

"There had been Empire. There had been metamorphosis. Now, after that love and that music and that dream of Rome, the poet must come to terms with being human, must accept being one thing instead of many, exiled by Time back to the finality of the body. This is Flowers as Mind Control. Like her co-pilot, the Ovid of the Black Sea Letters, Laura Minor comes off like a fallen god, stranded on barbarian ramparts, piecing together the new real."
—Josh Bell