American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has won the Dylan Thomas award for her first poetry collection | Dylan Thomas award

This year’s inaugural poetry competition with themes including race, culture and feminism has won Swansea University Dylan Thomas award.

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney picked up the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honor of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut Joy Is My Middle Name. He was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, where Thomas was born.

The collection, selected by the jury, is “exciting, full of life, humor and imagination. Debevec-McKenney is a talented artist,” said Irenosen Okojie, chairman of the jury. This book is very interesting because it inspires readers to have feelings of love that are true and words that feel like medicine for our troubled times.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney was born in Connecticut, and now lives in Georgia, where she is an associate professor at Emory University. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review.

Joy Is My Middle Name explores what happened in the twenties and thirties, dealing with race, sex, feminism, alcoholism and consumerism. It is among the first poems published by the indie press Fitzcarraldo.

In a comments to the Guardian, Fiona Sampson described Debevec-McKenney’s collection as “fast and furious”: “This is the destruction of the North American lifestyle of creative programs and ‘people … at farmers’ markets are specific / about their choice of mushrooms’; cold chicken wings for breakfast and statues of racist presidents.” He called the poems “sexy and fun…

Sampson added that the collection echoes Fitzcarraldo’s “contemporary and experimental style in ways that revive UK poetry”.

In an interview with Literary Hub last year, Debevec-McKenney described her poems as being read primarily by “Crazy, confused girls like me“. “Everyone can read my poems, I hope, but everything that I reveal about myself in my poems, the shameful stories that I tell, all the bad things that I have done, I know that other girls felt the same way,” she said. “I have longed for love and affection. I hate my body. I met my best female friends. I have thrown myself to people who don’t want me. I am happy to accept all this if other girls agree with it.”

Other titles shortlisted for this year’s award were To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong; We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown; Under the Blue by Suzannah V Evans; Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt and Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu.

Joining Okojie on the judging panel were writers Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly and Eley Williams.

Last year’s award was presented to Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher for her book The Coinand previous winners include Caleb Azumah Nelson, Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Fiona McFarlane and Kayo Chingonyi.