2024 Winner:
Hell and Back by Rachelle Toarmino
Broadside design by Jake Rose (https://www.instagram.com/jakerosepoetry/)
This powerful lyric poem moves dynamically from the embodied immediate (“This is my body take it”) to a more expansive collective (“I can’t keep myself to myself”). Line by magnetic line, this utterance gathers force. There is pain here, dysphoria, antagonism, and history. There is music. And yes, there is beauty. But the speaker never rests or waits in any of these elements; instead, she embraces abundance. Her “[m]usic is touching things.” Listen.
-—Claire Marie Stancek, judge’s citation, 2024
Rachelle Toarmino is a poet and multidisciplinary writer from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and several chapbooks, most recently Comeback (Foundlings Press, 2021). Her poems and essays on poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Electric Literature, Iterant, Literary Hub, Poets.org, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.
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2023 Winner:
DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT ARC by Daniel Schonning
Broadside design by Jake Rose (https://www.instagram.com/jakerosepoetry/)
Stitched with echo and near-metaphor, DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT ARC meditates on the task of the dead and the living. It inhabits a world, like ours, with t-shaped pylons, pilgrims, poplar trees. Such rutilant sores of rust. In it you will be both lost and held.
-—Nathalie Khankan, judge’s citation, 2023
Daniel Schonning’s poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily, Orion Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Geneva, New York, where he teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and serves as a Poetry Editor at Seneca Review.
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2022 Winner:
Why I am not a painter by Steevie Chinitz
Broadside design by Jake Rose (https://www.instagram.com/jakerosepoetry/)
chosen by Martha Ronk, 2022
Having worked in schools around the country, Steevie (as she is called) now lives in the Western Catskills, moving out infrequently to teach. She has been published in Denver Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Westchester Review, and others. She escaped briefly for an MFA (2017).
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2021 Winner:
iwi hilo means thigh bone means core of one’s being by Noʻu Revilla
Broadside design by Jake Rose (https://www.instagram.com/jakerosepoetry/)
chosen by Thylias Moss
Noʻu Revilla (she/her) is an ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) poet and educator based in Hawaiʻi. Born and raised on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in Pālolo valley on the island of Oʻahu. She is a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series competition. Her debut book of poetry Ask the Brindled will be published by Milkweed Editions in fall 2022. Her work has also been featured or is forthcoming from Poetry, Lit Hub, ANMLY, Beloit, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. She earned a PhD in creative writing from the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she is now an assistant professor teaching ʻŌiwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics. She is a lifetime student of Haunani-Kay Trask. Learn more about Noʻu at https://www.nourevilla.com/.
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Winner 2020:
(Dis)ambiguation by Ae Hee Lee
Broadside design by Ae Hee Lee
“(Dis)ambiguation” is a poem examining the mere act of naming, in all its complicated intimacies and emptinesses. Throughout the distances crossed and uncrossed I had the sense of being carried to the original words that spoke the universe into being, the heartbreaking sounds that were lighting the way.—Jennifer S. Cheng, judge’s citation, 2020
Born in South Korea and raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming at the Georgia Review, New England Review, Southeast Review, Poetry Magazine, and The Adroit Journal among others. She is the author of two chapbooks: Bedtime//Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017) and Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021).
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Winner 2019:
Some critics have taken…by Toby Altman
Broadside design by Toby Altman
Toby Altman’s “Some critics have taken…” offers itself as a poem that knows it can honestly portray its deepest cares only by learning to embody those cares. Here ekphrasis ceases to be mere description, but more intensely, becomes a mode of enthralled entanglement, miming the tendril-motions of Louis Sullivan’s wrought iron ornament in order to participate in the deep and loving eros that informs the form. Equally loving homage and clear-eyed thought, Altman reminds us of poetry’s unique potency to find honor and value in places where the same are too easily overlooked.—Dan Beachy-Quick, judge’s citation, 2019
Toby Altman is the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and several chapbooks, including Every Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg (Except One), winner of the 2018 Ghost Proposal Chapbook Contest. His poems can be found in Gulf Coast, jubilat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies. He holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
