Wake Forest Alum Mackenzie Kozak to Publish Award-Winning Poetry Collection

Congratulations to Mackenzie Kozack on her debut collection, no swaddle, which has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize and will be published in April 2025. We look forward to hosting her for a reading in the near future.

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Mackenzie Kozak is a poet living in Asheville, NC. She graduated from Wake Forest in 2013 and has since received her MA from UNC-Greensboro, where she served as the Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review. She currently works as an Associate Editor at Orison Books and as a therapist specializing in grief counseling. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Missouri Review, jubilat, Sixth Finch, THRUSH Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM and elsewhere.

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Mackenzie Kozak examines the complex question of whether or not to bear children. Through a series of untitled American sonnets, the poems speak to themes of origin and desire, noting the shame that can accompany such a decision. Many poetry collections speak to the varied griefs of becoming a mother, losing a child, or being unable to have a child, but this collection gives specific voice to another grief that feels unspeakable: the possible conclusion of not wanting to be a mother.

no swaddle reads as a sort of meditation on theme, its repeated form mirroring the spiraling nature of indecision and reconsideration of the same major question alongside its continuous struggle to name. In the end, this grappling with elements of grief and shame becomes a way of moving toward greater agency and fulfillment.

View no swaddle on the University of Iowa Press website: https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/no-swaddle