writing awards | recent and pending publications | testimonials

Writing Awards

2007 Colorado Authors' League Award for Poetry
Lost Songs & Last Chances

2005 Colorado Book Award Finalist and Colorado Authors' League Award for Fiction
A Return to Emptiness

2003 Colorado Book Award for Poetry
Never Summer: Poems from Thin Air

2nd Place 2005 Fugue Prose & Poetry Contest
“How I Swam to the Bottom of the Ocean” (poetry)
Judge: Tony Hoagland

Honorable Mention, 2005 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards
“Elvis Comes Back” (poetry)

2nd Place Hard Ground 2001 Writing Contest
"A Return To Emptiness" (short fiction)

1st Place Java Mountain 2001 Winter Poetry Contest
“Why I’m Bleeding” (poetry)

2nd Place Seedhouse Magazine 1999 Summer Writing Contest
“Gathering Chokecherries Along the River Bottom, Late August” (poetry)

1st Place 1995 POIESIS Poetry Contest
“Advice for visitors to Rock Springs” (poetry)

2nd Place 1991 Paintbrush Poetry Award
“Trainride Lengthwise California” (poetry)

Honorable Mention 1990 Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize
Academy of American Poets

Honorable Mention 1983 Browning Society Dramatic Monologue Contest
“voice of a witch, 1638” (poetry)

Recent & Pending Publications

“Dream of the Dying Soldier” Coe Review
“Paris Conundrum” Prairie Schooner
“The Wounding Moment” Pilgrimage
“The Scars of Gillette, Wyoming” Many Mountains Moving
“Parenting on Pluto” The Cincinnati Review
“The Antikythera Mechanism” and “Dream of Your House, Demolished” The Notre Dame Review
“Dream on the Underground” finalist for Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry
“A Screwball Rispetto” Marginalia
“A Winter Lullaby” Pilgrimage
“Lunch With Creeley” Poetry 365
“Inferno Casino” (poem anthologized in Open Windows)
“On The Bank of the Nameless River” Denver Post
“Poison Words” and “The Defenseman’s Lament” Marginalia
“Train Going Away” (fiction anthologized in Please Stay on the Trail: A Collection of Colorado Fiction, 2006 Black Ocean Press)
"The Arc of War" Rocky Mountain News
"Elegy for Rosa" Urban Spectrum
"Morning After a Bitter Year" (reprint) Rocky Mountain News
"Dream of the Golf Widows" Colorado Lawyer
"to whom does the flesh belong" (monograph with Jenny Morgan); +gallery

Testimonials & Reviews

There is a lovely balance between form and subject matter in [Lost Songs & Last Chances]. While the poems are quiet at times, their power is released through an excellent execution of poetic qualities: subtle and unexpected music, nice line breaks, and impressive handle on a range of forms. Overall, a very impressive collection. — Mary Gannon, Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine

Chris Ransick's poems in Never Summer: Poems from Thin Air speak tenderly in a quiet conversational voice about romance and family, nature and weather, sickness and death. The language of these poems is simple but layered so that the perception of reality becomes at times almost super-real, with images that reveal an acute observation of nature, "the rough bruises of a storm cloud" or "slats of light falling." In a meadow, the speaker notes that "hip-deep snow/from this distance [becomes] a frayed quilt/ stitched by wapiti tracks." This book is an everyday world where tragedy and bad news occasionally intrude. So does an ironic humor. Through all the ups and downs, there is a thread of confidence in the future, the belief that "We will build a lasting home." —Mary Crow, Colorado Poet Laureate

Chris Ransick writes beautiful, spare prose. His is language infused with the power of direct speech. He sees the perfect—and often heartbreaking —details in the worlds his characters inhabit. In ordinary lives he views profound humanity and our deeply shared need to matter—to ourselves, to those we care about, to the great mystery of which we're a part. Creating a spare and often spell-binding lyricism, one reminiscent of Raymond Carver and James Welch, Chris Ransick is a gentle, insightful, and deeply respectful storyteller, and I look forward to entering worlds he creates time and time again.— Russell Martin, author of Picasso’s War

It was a great privilege for me to have the opportunity to give a public reading of your excellent story, "When the River Runs Red," as it would be for any actor. I was glad to hear that you were moved by the reading, but I can't imagine that anyone could hear or read the story without being moved. In fact, I must confess that the night I read it was the first time I'd been able to get through it without falling apart at the end. Somehow you married the vivid descriptions of the familiar southwest landscape with the emotional lives inside the characters, and it was actually the gorgeous descriptions that always caused my emotions to overflow. — Guy Williams, Colorado Homegrown Tales

I admire the unwavering imaginative persistence of this writer in his fantastic story; pure, unironized narrative is one of the most endangered of poetic species now; this [writing] stays true to its mystery, with verve and dignity. Bravo.— Tony Hoagland

Following Richard Hugo as much as John Wesley Powell, Chris Ransick is an exacting cartographer of the West's vast landscapes, physical and emotional, rendering them with such care you will agree with him, "This is where / you have always lived, no matter what they say."—Jake Adam York

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Never Summer: Poems From Thin Air
Reviewed in the 10/14/05 Rocky Mountain News by Peter Thorpe
Grade: A

To read the superb poetry of Chris Ransick is to step outside and take a deep breath of Colorado mountain air. Even the nasty crows become things of grace and beauty: "at night their shapes/ left holes between the stars."

It's no surprise that Ransick has won the Colorado Book Award for poetry. He takes us, with new eyes, through the Rockies, showing them as they've never been seen before. Avalanches look like "tongues hanging out of a mouth," and the moon is "a sharp disk of ice,/ a taut bright hole in the black." Icicles "sink unto snow banks/ with only a soft shush."

Unlike many writers, Ransick maneuvers comfortably in such strict traditional forms as the sonnet and the villanelle, thoroughly immersing readers in the world of nature.