Winners & Finalists

Jaswinder Bolina
English as a Second Language
(Copper Canyon Press)Jaswinder Bolina’s most recent book, English as a Second Language and Other Poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in October 2023. He is the author of three previous poetry collections: The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), as well as the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His debut collection of essays, Of Color (2020), was published on McSweeney’s Quarterly Journal. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of English.

Victoria Chang
With my Back to the World
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little, Brown in the U.K.)Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little, Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. Other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

Romeo Oriogun
The Gathering of Bastards
(University of Nebraska Press)Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies, Nomad, and The Gathering of Bastards. A finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, he is the winner of the 2022 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature, the 2023 Julie Suk Award, and the 2023 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Oriogun’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other publications. A juror for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University.

Gregory Pardlo
Spectral Evidence
(Knopf)Gregory Pardlo is the author of Spectral Evidence, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem and Air Traffic, a memoir of essays. He has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Pardlo divides his time between New York and the United Arab Emirates, where he is Head of Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Sasha West
How to Abandon Ship
(Four Way Books)Sasha West is the author of How to Abandon Ship (2024) and Failure and I Bury the Body (2013), as well as the recipient of the National Poetry Series and a Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Georgia Review, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency. As part of the eco-arts collaborative Hammonds + West, her multimedia shows with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Texas A&M, ArtPrize Michigan, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at St. Edward’s University in Austin, where she founded the Environmental Humanities program.

Sarah Ghazal Ali
Theophanies
(Alice James Books)Sarah Ghazal Ali is a writer, editor, and educator. She is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books), which won the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. A Stadler and Kundiman Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch magazine and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.

Ariana Benson
Black Pastoral
(University of Georgia Press)Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Her debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023), won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2024 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. A 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Benson has also received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, among others. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students, and also holds Master of Arts degrees in Poetic Practice and Scriptwriting, earned as a Marshall Scholar. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.

Alisha Dietzman
Sweet Movie
(Beacon Press)Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie (Beacon Press, 2023), selected by Victoria Chang for the National Poetry Series and shortlisted for the 2024 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. She received her PhD in Divinity with a focus on aesthetics and ethics from the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her creative and critical work has also received support from the Rebecca Swift Foundation, the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Elisa Gonzalez
Grand Tour
(FSG)Elisa Gonzalez is the author of Grand Tour (FSG, 2023). Named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker, Grand Tour received the 2024 Levis Reading Prize, a 2024 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a 2024 Whiting Award. Gonzalez is also the recipient of fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Rolex Foundation, W.S. Merwin Conservancy, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program, among others. She is at work on a novel and a nonfiction book, both forthcoming from FSG.

Alison Thumel
Architect
(University of Arkansas Press)Alison Thumel’s debut poetry collection, Architect, was selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and New England Review. She lives and writes in Wisconsin.