To quote Solmaz Sharif, who selected Cawley's manuscript as the winner of our 18th Annual Book Prize: "Stephanie Cawley's My Heart But Not My Heart, I want to say, is a book of refusals. The losses and grief that refuse language, the poet's own refusal of certain performances, the poem's refusal of expected forms, the speaker's refusal to slap a manicure on and understand it as self-care, despite the therapist's best intentions. It is in part about the ways in which our refusals, and our passivity, brought about often by external forces and pressures are then pathologized, medicated, explained away in the dismal language of diagnosis."

Stephanie Cawley is the author of No More Flowers (Birds, LLC) and My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions), chosen by Solmaz Sharif as winner of the Slope Book Prize. They were a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, and their poems and hybrid writing have been featured in Poetry Daily, the PEN Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and published in journals including Protean, TYPO, and West Branch. They live in Philadelphia.