Essays & Stories:

2024 Participant in Nonfiction Workshop, Community of Writers, California.

‘The Happiness Quotient, Ragaire, May 2024.

2022 City of Seattle CityArtist Grant Recipient - for a collection of essays and photos exploring the way images of protest influence our conception of home, and a series of community-based writing workshops

‘A Book for This,’ Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from the Ireland Chair of Poetry, University College Dublin Press, 2020

What the Water Holds, First Page Prize top 15 percent of entries, 2020 - for first 1,250 words of a nonfiction collection

“Restless Creature,” Hinterland, 2019.

“Emily Holt’s Restless Creature weaves a love story with film criticism in a rich, beautifully told piece that spans continents and time.”

Artist in Residence, Centrum, 2019, for work on a nonfiction collection

"Hunger,"  appears in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen and Dinah Lenney,  W. W. Norton & Co., November 2015.

The essay is mentioned by Janet Sternburg in the LA Times Book Review, December 11, 2015:

“Emily Holt, whose first publication this is, writes a gorgeous line that could also describe this book: ‘We’re indirect, all possibilities running off in rivers that splinter the country, because who would want to choose just one river?’ Brief Encounters doesn’t ask us to choose one river but rather to see all possibilities. Paradoxically, “brief” can be another word for generous, in this poetic and generative anthology.”

Quotes on this site's cover page are from this essay.

Poetry

“Alluvion,” The Madrona Project: Art in a Public Voice, Vol. III, No. 1, 2022.

“Hippodrome,” by Elena Shvarts, translated from Russian with Grace Mahoney, AGNI, 2022.

Though the Walls Are Lit, Lost Horse Press, 2020

  • Semi-finalist, Tomaž Šalamun Prize, 2019 (chapbook)

  • Honorable Mention, Tupelo Open Reading Period, 2018 (manuscript)

  • Special commendation, 2017 Patrick Kavanagh Award, selected by Brian Lynch (chapbook )

  • Finalist, Munster Literature Centre's 2016 Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition (chapbook)

From Thomas McCarthy:

"…technically fab…savvy, fiercely aware of the technical aspects of making a poem work – by riding on the tone created by space and descriptive hesitation."

“Impressionist at the Border,” Pontoon Poetry, 2020.

“A Separation,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 2019.

“Interfaced,” Best New British and Irish Poets, selected by Maggie Smith, Eyewear Publishing, 2018.

Featured Reader, Introductions Series, Cork International Poetry Festival 2018.

“Mystic,” Runner-up, 2017 Dermot Healy International Poetry Award, selected by Vona Groarke. 

“When We Were Foreign,” Longlist, 2017 Dermot Healy International Poetry Award.

“Our Red Evening,” Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 121, Spring 2017.

No Wounds Here: Image + Text, Selected, Talking River, 2016.

No Wounds Here: Image + Text, Semifinalist, 2016 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.

“Do You Take This Man?” Abridged, 2016.

“If Not Savior” and “Stay or Go,” The Honest Ulsterman, 2015.

“Belfast, Béal Feirste, Winter 2001” was a finalist for the 2015 Jane Plumly Prize, Hermeneutic Chaos.

“Confessional” and “The Tinahely Show” appear in the 2009 issue of Fragments.

Selected Research

“Rupture and Call: Famine Encounters from Contemporary Irish and Ukrainian Women in the Arts,” co-authored with Grace Mahoney, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Vol 7, no 2 (2020), “Trauma in Social and Cultural Contexts.”