2024 Fischer/Cantor Prize Winning Poems

Fischer Prize Winner

Rebecca Foust, “Polaris”
Rebecca Foust’s poems won the 2024 James Dickey Prize and the 2023 New Ohio Review Prize and are in recent issues of The Common, Iowa Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, and Southern Review. Her fourth book, ONLY (Four Way Books, 2022) earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and her fourth chapbook, YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR (Backbone 2024), inspired by the parallels between George Orwell’s 1984 and our country’s emerging political landscape, just released. Other recognitions include the James Hearst, Pablo Neruda, and Poetry International prizes, and fellowships from the Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee, and a Marin County Poet Laureateship where Rebecca’s program, “Poetry as Sanctuary,” featured readings by local immigrant poets. Rebecca was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania and now divides her time between northern California and northern Minnesota.

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales: “The poem unfurls on the page like the galaxies in our open skies. It also affirms the stars belong to us all with its native connections.”

Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist

Kelly Rowe with “Waiting for Sunrise”
Kelly Rowe’s full-length collection, Rise Above the River, won the 2021 Able Muse Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Child Bed Fever, (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022) and Flying South on the Back of a Dove (Texas Review Press, 2019). She has recently published poems in journals including 32 Poems, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, and New Letters. She lives in Flagstaff Arizona and works as a volunteer immigration attorney, representing undocumented women. She explained, “Waiting for Sunrise first appeared inCrosswinds Poetry Journal IX (2023). It is one of a number of poems about immigration contained in my new manuscript, Beyond the Archipelago. The manuscript is about travel in all its various forms, and those particular poems were inspired by my clients, who have taught me so much about what it takes to survive certain journeys.”

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales:“With its focus on a swan and a phone call, the poem preserves the plight of the migrant experience and the persistence needed to prevail.”

Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist

Liza Patrick with “How You Hold”
Liza Patrick is a nurse-midwife, writer, and mother who lives in Boulder, Colorado. She holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts and the University of Pennsylvania. This is her first published work.

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales: “The poem is about disruption, family, and the helplessness we feel when we cannot immediately save who we love.”

Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist

Mary Buchinger with “Gentian”
Mary Buchinger, whose books include Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award), The Book of Shores (2024),and Virology (2022) both from Lily Poetry Review Books, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, served on the New England Poetry Club board for many years, and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. Her poetry appears in AGNI, Plume, Salamander, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize.
Buchinger adds, regarding her winning poem, “Gentian is a burning haibun, a form created by torrin a. greathouse. I’m grateful to K.T. Landon for including this particular form in her Arlington Community Education class. The caretaking for the gentian in this poem was shared by Hilary Sallick, without whom I would not have trekked into these urban wilds, nor would have ever found that lowly gentian again after being introduced to it by Cambridge conservationist Ellen Mass who had persuaded us to serve as its stewards.”

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales:“The full block of prose, followed by the blackout stanza work together to play on the page and to thoughtfully speak to the vanishing environment.”

Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist

Julia Liu with “Fortune Cookie”
Julia Liu is a writer based in New England. An American Voices medalist, she has received recognition from the Pulitzer Center, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Dawn Prize for Poetry, and the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net as well as the Pushcart Prize, and appears or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, among others.

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales: “The long poem explores the memories, food, and beautifully complex dynamics of growing up in a Chinese-American family.”

Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist

Carlos Andrés Gómez with “Aperture”
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. His debut full-length poetry collection Fractures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner and 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2020 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal and the International Book Award for Poetry, Gómez has been published in The Nation, New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), and elsewhere. In 2019 Carlos won the Fischer Prize with his poem C(h)ord. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For more, please visit: CarlosLive.com

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales: “A poem with wonderfully surprising turns that offers commentary on the pressures of expectations and standards of beauty.”

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Dawn Dupler with “My hometown carved out a golf course from 2,000-year-old Native American ceremonial earthworks”
Dawn Dupler is the 2024 Winner of the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize and the 2023 Winner of MacGuffin’s Poet Hunt. She has also won Honorable Mention in the 2024 Vivian Shipley Poetry Contest and was a Semifinalist for the 2023 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been featured on the buses and trains of St. Louis’s MetroLink, and in Natural Bridge, Red Rock Review, Moon City Review, and other journals. She is also an Associate Editor of december literary journal.

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales: “A poem that nicely uses prose poetry to preserve a culture being erased below 18 holes.”

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

David Allen Sullivan with “To Eat a Peach”
David Allen Sullivan is the former poet laureate of Santa Cruz county. His books include: Strong- Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing, and Tim Seibles selected Black Butterflies Over Baghdad for the Hilary Tham capital collection, Word Works Books. Salt Pruning, a co-authored book of poems with Ignatius Valentine Aloysius, was published by Hummingbird Poetry Press. A book of poems about his Fulbright year in China with his family, Seed Shell Ash, is forthcoming from Salmon Press. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, lives in Santa Cruz with his family, and his website is: https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-1.

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales: “A delicious poem that carefully meditates dimensions and cultural contexts united by the stone fruit.”

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Samantha Russell with “Burnt Edges”
Samantha Russell is an emerging poet, born and raised in the Bay Area of California, now residing in Salem, Oregon. With a lifelong love of language, Samantha uses poetry to process her experiences and reflect on the world around her. When she’s not writing, Samantha can be found reading on her balcony with her dogs, Georgia and Clementine.

From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales: “This poem beautifully explores a dangerous fire and the trauma that follow for a challenged family.”

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Rafaella Del Bourgo with “Winter, Lower Longley, Tasmania”
From Fischer Prize judge Juan Morales:“A poem about a woman’s cold reflection and isolation in the rural reaches of Tasmania.”

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Gary V. Powell with “First Kill”
Gary V. Powell, a retired lawyer, lives with his beautiful wife near the shores of lovely Lake Norman, North Carolina. A 2022 deGroot Foundation Writer of Note and a Pushcart Prize nominee for both his poetry and short fiction, his first poetry chapbook, Super Blood Wolf Moon, won Kallisto Gaia Press’s 2020 Contemporary Poetry Prize. His second poetry chapbook, Permafrost, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2023. Recent poetry appears in Southword 44 and Kakalak 2022 and 2023. Recent fiction appears in the North Carolina Literary Review, Bull Men’s Fiction, and Prime Number Magazine.

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Kelly Houle with “The Basket of Apples”
Kelly Houle’s poems have been published in Alba, CALYX, Connecticut River Review, Crab Orchard Review, Kenyon Review, Radar Poetry, Sequestrum, and others. She was a finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the Arts and Letters ‘Unclassifiable’ contest and won a 2023 Vivian Shipley Award. She is also a painter. Her poem “The Basket of Apples” was first published in Radar Poetry (Issue 32), an electronic journal of poetry and artwork.

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Junxin Tang with “Portrait of My Grandfather in the Korean War (1952)”

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Partridge Boswell with “Stick Up”
Author of the 2023 Fool for Poetry Prize-winning chapbook Levis Corner House and Grolier Poetry Prize-winning collection Some Far Country, Partridge Boswell is co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival and teaches at Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters in Montreal. He troubadours widely with the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, whose debut release Last Night in America is available on Thunder Ridge Records. His Saguaro Prize-winning chapbook Not Yet a Jedi is also now a thing. Boswell was an Outstanding Finalist for the Fischer Prize last year (2023), in 2021, and in 2020 (all with different judges); and he has been a featured poet on our monthly online series Bardic Trails.

Fischer Prize Honorable Mention

Wisteria Deng with “Past Lives”
Wisteria lives in Connecticut. She runs a theater non-profit and delivers trauma-informed psychotherapy to sexual and gender minorities. She is a mental health practitioner, a writer and a daughter.

Cantor Prize Winner

Benny Manibog for “Honeycombs“
Benny Manibog (he/him) is an urban planner, writer, and outdoors enthusiast based in Denver, Colorado. He has degrees in civil engineering and urban planning from the University of Minnesota. This is his first published work.

Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist

Erica Reid for “The Joy of Flying Paper Airplanes”
Erica Reid’s debut collection Ghost Man on Second won the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published by Autumn House Press in early 2024. Erica’s poems appear in Rattle, Cherry Tree, Colorado Review, and more. ericareidpoet.com

“A thoughtful poem that explores the playful process of making music by sending the airplane into the air.” – Judge Juan Morales

Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist

Ginger Ayla for “Self-Portrait as Burn Out”
Ginger Ayla (she/her) is a writer and poet who lives on the Colorado-New Mexico border with her husband and their beloved troublemakers, Winnie, Olive, and Bug. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM International, Phoebe, Grist, Cleaver, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Best New Poets Anthology. Currently a full-time freelance writer and editor, she’s fueled by coffee, nature, and reality TV. You can find other writings on Substack @gingerayla.

“A wonderful poem that unfurls the anxieties, fears, and hope one feels while stuck in traffic and going back and forth to work.” – Judge Juan Morales

Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist

Marissa Grunes for “Erosion”
Marissa Grunes is a literary scholar and freelance writer whose work has appeared in Discover, Atlas Obscura, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Liberties. She is a lecturer at the University
of Colorado Boulder.

“A pastoral poem that meditates and brings together the fragility and preservation of landscape and tortoises.” – Judge Juan Morales

Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist

Carol Guerrero-Murphy for “Imperatives”
Carol D Guerrero-Murphy has published 3 full length books of poetry: Bright Path Dark River (November 2020, Colorado Authors League Poetry Award); Chained Dog Dreams (2019 Finishing Line Press); and Table Walking at Nighthawk (Ghost Road Press, 2007, WILLA Finalist). She has had work in American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Pilgrimage, Roanoke Review, Prairie Schooner and many other journals and anthologies. Her work earned 2 Pushcart Prize nominations. She returned to Denver in January 2022 after she escaped the Marshall Fire in Superior. A long time teacher of poets ages 3 to 93, coach and editor, preschools to prisons. PhD English. Denver University. (Photo of Carol and her horse Lucky by Linda Relyea.)

“A great meandering poem that follows a wild horse in deeply rich landscape.” – Judge Juan Morales

Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist

Kathryn Jordan for “Fire Lookout”
From Berkeley, CA, Kathryn Jordan’s poems have placed or won Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit, Muriel Craft Bailey, Connecticut River Poetry, and Patricia Dobler poetry prizes on multiple occasions. Winner of the San Miguel de Allende Poetry Prize, her work appears in The Sun, Comstock Review, New Ohio Review and Oberon, among others. She loves to hike the East Bay Hills in search of the varied thrush, a bird that sings two notes on one breath.

“A poem that reminds us to consider climate change and the specific impact of fire danger in the west.” – Judge Juan Morales

Cantor Prize Honorable Mention

Kelly Vande Plasse for two of her poems “One Snake” and “Singing Stone”
Kelly Vande Plasse is a wordsmith and architect, working in the field of healthcare design and construction.  Her life’s journey has taken her from Michigan, to New York City (where she was once an assistant editor with the New York Quarterly) and now, to the front range of northern Colorado.  Her poems have received awards from the Atlanta Review, the Paterson Literary Review, and the Hippocrates Society for Poetry and Medicine.  Her work also appears in the Naugatuck River Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and the New York Quarterly.

One Snake: “A poem that finds the poetic beauty of a text exchange between a parent and son about a fearful snake” – Judge Juan Morales

Singing Stone: “A poem where landscape and rock finds their voice and sings.” – Judge Juan Morales

Cantor Prize Honorable Mention

Everett Wilson for “Peeling Grapefruit”
Everett Wilson earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from SUNY-Binghamton in 1988. Since then he’s been a bank teller, legal secretary, adjunct writing instructor, lover, husband, grieving widower, poet, Zen monk, waiter, baker, chef, bookkeeper, editor, memoirist, tantrika, chef (again?!!!), a/v tech, baker (again?!!!) and husband all over again, because apparently once is just not enough. He’s been all of these things, but is none of them. Most recently, he finds himself meditating a lot more than is probably healthy, writing for the sake of his sanity, and working at the local library, where all the cool people hang out and talk about books.

“A tender poem and the bittersweet sharing of a grapefruit and kiss.”– Judge Juan Morales

Cantor Prize Honorable Mention

Matthew Wimberley for “Self-Portrait with Magpie”
“A meandering poem that nicely explores memory, past, and present captured and stolen by trickster magpie.” – Judge Juan Morales