Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2025
Congratulations to the winners of the 23rd annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest!
Honorable Mention $500
- Alishya Almeida, edge effects, Poetry
- Ja’net Danielo, Ode to the Hot Flash, Poetry
- Jomil Ebro, Holy Nights, Poetry
- Latorial Faison, A Shroud for Mother’s Day, Poetry
- Carlos Andrés Gómez, Aperture, Poetry
- Margo Wheaton, Going There, Poetry
- Simon Peter Eggertsen, A Request to Live On as Color and Spice #4, Traditional Verse
- Carlos Andrés Gómez, Pantoum After Today’s Mass Shooting, Traditional Verse
- Mickie Kennedy, Late Arrival, Traditional Verse
- Elisabeth Preston-Hsu, A Hinged Double Sonnet For My Laparoscopy, August 1, 2023, Traditional Verse
- Maya Salameh, Archive on Spilled Entryway, Traditional Verse
Judge Michal 'MJ' Jones comments on the winning entries
There's no argument over which literary device supersedes all others in this year's prizewinning poems: it is image. More than rhyme, metaphor, simile, or meter, image is the thread that connects these poets across vastly different themes and subject matter. Image.
Moonlight inside the womb. Scattered bones of a fawn. Stripes melding into celestia. Floating boleros across the kitchen. An orchard of orchids. A welter of pine. A throat quaked raw.
Let the images radiating through this year's winning poems leave their imprints through your heart—let their echoes resound and change the way you experience sensation and humanity—even if for just a glimpse.
The Winners
"Sonogram Vision" by Emily Davis-Fletcher
Tom Howard Prize for verse in any style
Intention and choice—the winning poem is saturated with it. This poet chooses wording very thoughtfully—knowing that arms can destroy, that arms can hold, that arms "grow out of heart cells". The poet of "Sonogram Vision" knows precisely that the economy of our language extends to our humanity, that we cannot see our own growing children without also seeing the wounded children of Gaza.
"Tiger Mom" by Qiaorui (Sherry) Zhang
Margaret Reid Prize for verse that rhymes or has a traditional style
The author of Tiger Mom gives us a dazzling, haunting, and deeply affecting narrative. Rich with rituals of becoming and unbecoming, this work questions what remains of us when we blend ourselves in, shed our skins down to bone.
Honorable Mentions: Tom Howard Prize
"edge effects" by Alishya Almeida
"edge effects" is a tough, resilient, gritty poem about surviving in "a dying world bent on living". Flavorful and rhythmic, image-rich and vulnerable, it pays homage to what has been survived, and what will be.
"Ode to the Hot Flash" by Ja'net Danielo
This piece surprises at each vulnerable turn—deepening beneath the skin of the speaker further and further down into a landscape of memory and etymology.
"Holy Nights" by Jomil Ebro
Strong in cadence and even more so in image, "Holy Nights" narrates a childhood evening between two young siblings, delicately placing us right there alongside them.
"A Shroud for Mother's Day" by Latorial Faison
"A Shroud for Mother's Day" is a poem that conveys—both with words and without, through careful use of space and loss—the sharp grief that distance and silence create. I found that I stopped breathing as I read it.
"Aperture" by Carlos Andrés Gómez
"Aperture" beautifully narrates how what we are instructed to loathe within ourselves—often at young ages—can later be healed when reflected within our children.
"Going There" by Margo Wheaton
Electrifying and devastating, this is the type of poem that does not leave you for a while—as with the speaker, I "have not left that night".
Honorable Mentions: Margaret Reid Prize
"A Request to Live On as Color and Spice #4" by Simon Peter Eggertsen
The poet's thick language drops us into an afterlife that is the antithesis of darkness—one that is splitting with color, flavor, essence, and texture. I could live—I mean, die—with that!
"Pantoum After Today's Mass Shooting" by Carlos Andrés Gómez
A pantoum is the perfect container for the awful tragedy which repeats—the mass shooting—and the poet devastatingly captures the innocence of the child's voice and wonder amidst it.
"Late Arrival" by Mickie Kennedy
In the space of a single breath, and with such subtle rhyme, the poet juxtaposes the biological and spiritual processes of living and dying, of beauty and decomposition.
"A Hinged Double Sonnet for My Laparoscopy, August 1, 2023" by Elisabeth Preston-Hsu
"Hope does not forget and watches with me." In this double sonnet, the poet transforms the pain and uncertainty of medical trauma into the field and fauna of nature.
"Archive on Spilled Entryway" by Maya Salameh
The poet transforms framed photographs into animated, breathing beings that beckon our loved ones beside us.
We received 2,471 submissions from around the world. We would like to recognize these semifinalists for their outstanding efforts: Partridge Boswell, Claire Hong, Michael Lavers, Ana M. Mahomar, Elisávet Makridis, Minh Nguyen, Maya Salameh, and Jennifer Tubbs.
See our press release about the winners
Learn more about the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest
Contest Judges
Briana Grogan
Briana Grogan (she/they), assistant judge of our Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, is a Black queer femme from Southern California. Her poetry found form in San Francisco, where they currently live and work as a bookstore clerk. She received her MFA in Poetry from Mills College. Their writing explores the silence in grief and the joy in healing. She was an artist in residence at Art House San Clemente, the Guest Poetry Editor for Foglifter Journal Vol. 8, and a finalist for the 2021 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work can be found in Foglifter Journal, The Ana, and is upcoming in When We Exhale and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Photo by Lauren Hanussak
Contest Judges
Dare Williams
Dare Williams, assistant judge of our Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, is a Queer HIV-positive poet and literary worker rooted in Southern California. A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, he has received support/fellowships for his work from the Ashbery Home School, The Frost Place, Brooklyn Poets, Breadloaf, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Poets 2022 and is featured in Foglifter, Frontier, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine and an MFA student at Warren Wilson College. To learn more about Dare's writing, visit his website.
Contest Judges
Michal ‘MJ’ Jones
Michal 'MJ' Jones (they/he), final judge of our Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, is an award-winning poet, parent, and editor living in Oakland, CA. Their poetry has appeared in the American Academy of Poets, Obsidian, Split This Rock, Muzzle Magazine, TriQuarterly Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Their debut collection of poetry, Hood Vacations, won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. They are also the author of a chapbook, Soft Armor, from Black Lawrence Press (2023). Often addressing the troubling and haunting aspects of life, violence, and identity, MJ's poetry blends lyrical, documentary, and confessional modes.
