It’s a great joy to announce the result of the 2025 Stephen Dunn Prize for poetry. The winning poem is “when Creation perpetuates – in four parts,” by Venaya Yazzie, selected by this year’s poetry judge, Sandra Lim. She notes:
This is a strange and delicate poem, not least for its quiet, yet pointed question to the
reader at its end. I admire how the poem makes a theme of the labor of stationing the
image in the reader’s mind, by referring to observations of the natural world and to
intimations of an abstract, female antecedent.
Thank you so much, Sandra Lim, for being this year’s poetry judge, and thank you to all who participated in the contest. As is often the case, we received an extraordinary breadth and depth of entries, and it was particularly difficult to narrow the field down to the pieces that appear in this contest issue. I hope these poems— winner, finalists, and editor’s picks— will ground you, edify you, console you in this turbulent, disorienting moment. You will discover among them profound meditations on grief, both experienced and anticipated; an astonishing new perspective on the September 11th event; a far window framing the view homeward from the perspective of the Afghan diaspora; and much, much more.
–Robbie Gamble
Robbie Gamble’s essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Pangyrus, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree and Tahoma Literary Review. He was a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop. He worked many years as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, and now divides his time between Massachusetts and Vermont.
