Zahra Gordon

The MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts faculty is pleased to announce the Plork Prize winner for 2026, Zahra Gordon. (All graduating MFA in CWPA students are eligible for this annual award.)

This year’s MFA thesis cohort displayed key elements of what we in the MFA call “plorking”—playing, working, creating with abandon, helping others with joy. The plork ethic is the heart of our program. Faculty were especially impressed by this class’s easygoing teamwork to bring about the annual MFA Reading and Book Fair, with Plork Coordinators John Guchemand and Alicia Potee leading the process.

Zahra Gordon, a poet, worked closely with Professors Steven Leyva, Marion Winik, and Andrew Klein during her thesis year. “What does it look like to live in a red-lined community in Baltimore?” the poet asks her reader on the back of her thesis book, Butterfly Praxis. As her bio details, “[She] is a Caribbean poet and writer. Her work has been published in journals such as Intersect, Mantis, and the anthology Thicker than Water (Peekash Press).”

 

“Zahra’s book concept, growing out of her reading of Lawrence Brown’s Black Butterfly, expressed both her personality and the essence of Baltimore with creativity, intelligence, and a mixture of whimsy and poignancy,” said Professor Winik. “Her cover is one of the most memorable in program history.”

Zahra’s cover features a black-and-white portrait of herself, wearing a max-glamorous fur coat and serious expression, riding a city bus. In a highly Plorky turn, she asked Kearra Amaya Gopee to do a photo shoot precisely with the cover in mind. A color photo on the back depicts Zahra and her precocious young son, who visited MFA classes and made many prof and student friends along the way.

“Zahra’s book is a shining culmination of patience, intention, and love. It is a joyful and powerful experience from cover to cover, and it was a privilege to watch her aesthetic unfold as it did,” said Professor Andrew Klein, who taught thesis design this spring alongside Professor Tony Frye.

“Zahra is a poet of patient observation, lyrical attention, and living language,” adds Professor Leyva. “Her poems arrive on the page both unexpectedly and inevitably, like an early bus when you thought everything was running late.”

At the annual book fair, to add a little more Plork, Zahra handed out sleek bus passes she’d designed that doubled as PR materials for her book.

We wish Zahra congratulations and excellent plorking to come!