The winning poems from the 2025 Fischer & Cantor Prize contests are published below (scroll down page for Cantor winners).
Fischer Prize Winner
Claire Blotter, “Water”
Claire Blotter is a writer who also directs theater and performs poetry with movement and body percussion. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Spillway, California Quarterly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Lilith, California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology and The Plant-Human Quarterly among other publications. She has published three poetry chapbooks and, most recently, her full-length collection, EXPANDING.WATER.WAYS., which she has been performing along waterways and wetlands threatened by a 2023 Supreme Court decision. She has taught poetry writing and performance at San Francisco State University, Dominican University, John F. Kennedy University and the College of Marin and through residencies at Worcester State College in Massachusetts and Yosemite Gateway Art Center. She represented San Francisco at National Poetry Slams in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, and her poetry videos are included in the Chicago Art Institute Archives. Her award-winning video documentary, WAKE-UP CALL: SAVING THE SONGBIRDS, has been screened in 11 film festivals from Mill Valley to Chicago. Currently, she teaches poetry writing workshops to Marin County children and teenagers through the California Poets in the Schools Program and is writing a non-fiction book about magic, nature and community.
From Fischer Prize judge Art Goodtimes: “A powerful performance piece, the poem moves like water in telling us about its narrator. Committing to one idea, and then sliding out of that eddy into another ripple in Blotter’s narrative flow of singing, dancing, talking.”
Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist
Carlos Andrés Gómez with “Pantoum after Today’s Mass Shooting” (which was first published in the Nation)
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, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He can be found @CarlosAGLive or CarlosLive.com
Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist
Dean Gessie with “Deer [sic] Poetry Contest Judges”
Dean Gessie has achieved global success as a poet and author. Among dozens of honors for poetry, Dean won the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in England, the UN-aligned Poetry Competition in Finland, the Enizagam Poetry Contest in California, the COP26 Poetry Competition in Scotland, the Samuel Washington Allen Poetry Prize in Massachusetts, the Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest in Florida, the Indigo Open Prize in England, the Ageless Authors Poetry Competition in Texas, the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize in Massachusetts, the Ink Nest Poetry Contest in North Carolina, the Editors’ Prize from the Spoon River Review in Illinois, the Allingham Arts Festival Poetry Contest in Ireland and a Creators of Justice Literary Award from the International Human Rights Art Festival in New York. Additionally, he was twice selected for The Best 64 Poets by Black Mountain Press in North Carolina and he was one of twenty international poets included in the Poetry Archive NOW! World View Video Anthology. Dean’s poetry book, goat song, won the Seven Hills Literary Competition in Florida for best poetry collection published since 2020.
Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist
Kate Adams with “Triple Conjunction”
Born in San Francisco, Kate Adams is a writer still living in California. Work has appeared in Centennial Review, Zzyzzyva, and elsewhere, and won awards from the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, in poetry and in fiction. Over many years of writing, she has come to enjoy the technical and artistic challenges of ballad and sonnet forms. She’s served as the editor-in-chief of Fault Zone, the anthology published by the SF Peninsula branch of the California Writers’ Club and is currently its poetry editor. Poets of influence include Matthew Arnold, Wallace Stevens and Gjertrude Schnackenberg. More of her work appears at www.MadManorWoman.com.
Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist
Ja’net Danielo with “Migration”
Ja’net Danielo is the author of the chapbooksThis Body I Have Tried to Write, winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors’ Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021). She has been awarded grants from the de Groot Foundation and the Arts Council for Long Beach and has been a winner of the River Heron Editors’ Prize, the Fischer Prize, and the Dorland Prize, an honorable mention for the Tom Howard Prize, and a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, and the Lascaux Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Journal, North American Review, swamp pink, and Diode, among other places. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja’net lives in Long Beach, CA, where she facilitates Word Women: Poetry Heals, a free virtual poetry workshop series for cancer patients and survivors. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.
Fischer Prize Outstanding Finalist
Eliana Lambros with “Lightning Rod”
The most formative years of my life were spent reading and writing in the mountains of Western Montana. The wild, spacious landscape shaped how I view the world and continues to influence my creativity. When writing, I often return to the intersection of the personal and the geographic- how the land we grow up on grows into us, and how our histories shape the present. I’ve studied literature and creative writing in both academic and informal settings, and am excited to keep growing as a storyteller, wherever life takes me next.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Isabel Shen with “Copydaughter”
Isabel C. Shen is a poet and oral history advocate from Oakland, California. Her writing has been recognized by the Oakland Public Library, Marin Poetry Center, The New York Times, and more. She has an Australian Labradoodle named Stella.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Jonathan X, Liu with “Palimpsest with Missing Name”
Jonathan lives in Alberta, Canada. He is currently exploring writing that engages with metaphysics, language, and the intersections of science, philosophy, and art. This is his first published work.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Julie Cummings with “While You Try to Float (Sestina)”
Julie Cummings, with her wife and three dogs (an elder spoiled dog, a spontaneous piddler, and a golden doodle full of more love than any dog ever), divides her time between Conifer and Frederick. She is an active member of the literary community, having served as the Past President of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies and the current President of Columbine Poets of Colorado. Julie regularly facilitates writing workshops and hosts an occasional poetry open mic on Zoom. She has been featured at various poetry events nationwide. Her poetry is published in multiple anthologies, and her book, Ride of My Life, is available on Amazon. Julie also has a self-published CD, Be Heard. When she isn’t deep into a poetry project, she and her wife and family of dogs are in the RV exploring. She believes that there is a poem for everyone, waiting to be discovered.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Michelle Bitting with “The Clearing”
Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Leander P. E. Isler with “An Incantation of New Beginnings” (under consideration for the Oxford Prize)
Leander P. E. Isler is a Swiss poet whose work explores the intersections of emotion, memory, and technology. He lives in Rueschlikon on Lake Zurich. Beyond writing, he works in business analysis, governance, and risk and studies the ethical dimensions of machine learning. “An Incantation of New Beginnings” reflects on a father’s passing and the quiet work of love that remains.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Devreaux Baker with “Blue Requiem”
Devreaux Baker is the first Poet Laureate of Mendocino County. She has published five books of poetry and won numerous awards including the 2025 Willie Morris Award for Poetry, the 2025 Barbara Mandigo Kellp Peace Poetry Prize, the 2024 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, the 2011 PEN Oakland Poetry Award for her book, Red Willow People, the 2022 Fischer Poetry prize, the 2017 US Poets in Mexico Prize, the 2012 Hawaii Council on Humanities Poetry award, and the 2010 Women’s Global leadership poetry Award. She is a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Hawthornden Castle. She is the Editor/Publisher of Spirit of Place: Mendocino County Anthology of Women Poets, and directs the Mendocino Coast Poets and Writers Reading Series at the Mendocino Art Center. She has taught Poetry in the Schools and produced the original Student Writing for Public Radio with the Voyagers Radio Program on KZYX, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Jill Manning with “Crossing Through Denali”
Jill Manning is a native of Buffalo, NY living in her adopted city of Los Angeles. She is an active member of the Method Writing Community led by Jack Grapes. Samples of Jill’s work appear in Method Writers Speak, Volume 1 published in 2024. Creative work as an executive in the beauty industry ignited her devotion to poetry and watercolor painting. Her writing is full of high energy, imagery, and abstraction. She is working on her first collection of poetry. and prose.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Jacob Sheetz-Willard with “Curriculum Vitae” which was first published in American Literary Review in the winter of 2023
Jacob Sheetz-Willard is a poet from Leadville, Colorado and an MFA graduate of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A former winner of the Cantor Prize, his work has appeared in Narrative, North American Review, Poetry Daily, The Shore, and elsewhere. He teaches literature and leads wilderness expeditions in the American West.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Elaine Zimmerman with “No Longer Missing”
Elaine Zimmerman is a national policy leader for children and families and a poet. Publications include two chapbooks-Rasp with Orchard Street Press and Era’s End with Finishing Line Press. Her poetry is in numerous journals, anthologies, newspapers, as well as in arts and travel magazines. She is the 2024 recipient of the Oberon Poetry Prize.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Allison Kujiraoka with “Natal One”
I am an American citizen, a native of a Philadelphia suburb. Since completing a BA in English and an MA in Linguistics, I have lived and worked the entirety of my adult life in Northeast Japan. I am an instructor of English as a Foreign Language at the secondary and tertiary levels by trade but have maintained a lifelong passion of reading and writing fiction and poetry. I have shared essays and poetry at planetahead.wordpress.com since 2012. My family, a husband and two sons, is bi-cultural and bilingual.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Susan Carew with “Bride of Dream Man”
S.K. Carew received a poetry fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts in 2000. She was a runner-up for poetry in the Poets & Writers 2003 Writers Exchange Contest. Her work has appeared in New York Quarterly, Pulpsmith, Westword, Colorado Visions, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband of 52 years next door to the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Eric Paul Shaffer with “Illumination”
Eric Paul Shaffer is author of nine poetry books, most recently Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems and Free Speech. Second Nature, a volume of new poems, will appear in January 2026. Other titles include Even Further West; A Million-Dollar Bill; Lāhaina Noon; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; Portable Planet; RattleSnake Rider; and Kindling.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Mara Adamitz Scrupe with “Gleam [a way]”
Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a visual artist, writer, documentary filmmaker and the recipient of divers creative grants and fellowships. Her cross-disciplinary creative practice explores a terrain of psychic, emotional and physical kinship with nature; her installations, artist books, sculptures, drawings, poems, and essays investigate how we as thinking animals are shaped and changed – emotionally, socially, politically, and spiritually – by our interdependencies with the natural world. Correlatively, Mara’s writing reflects on ideas of place-ness; her poems evoke palpable experiences of land, landscapes, plants and animals in extended ruminations on migration and mobility, displacement and dynamism, voyaging and settling in. Mara is the author of seven prizewinning poetry collections, and she has won or been shortlisted for international writing prizes including National Poetry Society Competition (UK) and Aesthetica Poetry Prize (UK). She serves as Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Mara lives with her husband on their farm bordering the James River in Virginia.
Fischer Prize Honorable Mention
Don Levering with “A Fortune”
Donald Levering was born in Kansas City and grew up there and in Oceanside, New York. In addition to being awarded a NEA Fellowship, he won the Quest for Peace Prize in rhetoric, the Tor House Foundation Prize and was Runner-Up for the Ruth Stone Prize. His 16th poetry book, Breaking Down Familiar, was 1st place winner in the 2023 New Mexico Press Women Creative Verse Book Contest. He lives in Santa Fe where he volunteers with Kitchen Angels and as a US citizenship tutor.
Cantor Prize Winner
Alicia Rebecca Myers, “On the Anniversary of My Due Date, You Ask to Braid My Hair”
Judge Commentary: The poem gifts us the pure crystal moment of the present – shining Arcturus, the hands fumbling in the hair – but also hurtles us backward to the speaker’s childhood and beyond to Basho’s existential moment in Kyoto, while also hurtling us forward, where the once messy child is now a man, hopefully doing his own laundry, and the speaker faces a sky at once familiar and yet forever changed. And all of these distinct time elements play out simultaneously against the backdrop of the seemingly infinitely aged stars. I love how the poem avoids the cliched ending comparing the speaker’s feelings of youth to the ages of the stars and instead opts for the richer, deeper metaphor of parallax, how what we see is not necessarily what is but is instead dependent on where we are in relation to everything else. The poem opens all space and all time and yet somehow keeps us focused on a fleeting moment between two unknown, ephemeral beings.
Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist
Josephine Jones with “Perfect Mud”
Judge Commentary: “The cold sting of the garden hose” was the clincher, though the broken song of the blackbird swimming through the willows, “the sickening green shimmer”, “the dead fish fragrance”, all of it combined to create that sense of beauty in brokenness that rises so far above the fake beauty of the perfectly curated. I want to be in this poem, face down, my arms shoved in the mud all the way up to my shoulders.
Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist
Dan Rosenberg with “The Covenant”
Judge Commentary: I am not Jewish, nor do I understand the full significance of the Hebrew letters and Jewish customs alluded to, but there is obviously so much at stake in this poem, and the poem carries this great weight with an elegant economy of words. “We / were here, we breathed, / we shambled through their world / on our strange clay feet.” Replace “their” with “the” and we have the universal experience of being human. Keep “their” in place, and we have the universal experience of being the “other”. And the closing line is a stunner.
Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist
Brenda Wildrick with “Final Episode of the Final Season”
Judge Commentary: The beauty of the sestina lies in the tension between repetition and innovation, in changing while staying the same. The poem carries these six words along like a river carrying six different boats that continually bob and shift on the current. Each time you see one it has shifted a bit in relation to the others. It’s a joy to simply watch the changing shapes and colors.
Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist
Joy Roulier Sawyer with “Tomato”
Judge Commentary: “And why plucked here, now,” – the quintessential question facing anyone who has lost someone dear to them. “This too is how our garden grew –”. Wisdom gets no simpler than this, and no more delicious.
Cantor Prize Outstanding Finalist
Eliana Lambros with “Cavity”
Judge Commentary: “My body is a dirtpit, swelling with floodwater.” There is much in the poem that is unsaid, but what is said is compelling.
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Kelly Vande Plasse with “Riding the Elephant”
Kelly Vande Plasse is an architect and wordsmith, working in the field of healthcare design and construction. Kelly was born and raised in Michigan, but spent most of her adult life in New York City, where at one time she was Associate Editor with the New York Quarterly. Kelly’s poems have received awards from the Paterson Literary Review, the Atlanta Review and the Hippocrates Society for Poetry and Medicine. Her poems have also appeared in the Naugatuck River Review, the Louisiana Review, Crosswinds and the New York Quarterly. She now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Moudi Sbeity with “The Happiness Carousel”
Moudi is a first-generation Lebanese-American poet and transpersonal therapist, and the author of the forthcoming books Want A World (Fernwood Press, 2006) and Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press, 2026). In a previous life, Moudi co-owned and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. They call the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado home.
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Heather Gardner with “Aubade for 5 am”
Heather Gardner is Colorado poet, retired high school English teacher, and a pyromaniac with language. She loves the fire created by rubbing words together: the slow, blue flame and the shower of tiny sparks that fountain into the night.
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Lorrie Wolfe with “Why I Go Fishing”
Lorrie Wolfe is an award-winning poet, freelance editor, and technical writer. She has lived in northern Colorado for over 50 years, including stints in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Poudre River and in an 1870’s log home on a working cattle ranch in Livermore. Lorrie won the 2023 Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award from Middle Creek Press for The Language of Crows and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also received a 2023 Pushcart nomination from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She served as poetry editor for RISE: An Anthology of Change, which won the 2020 Colorado Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Mountain, Earth’s Daughters, Pilgrimage, Plant-Human Quarterly, Encore, and more. Lorrie is a member of Columbine Poets of Colorado and serves on the Loveland Poet Laureate Board of Directors. She maintains an email list of more than 400 northern Colorado poets and sends out announcements nearly every day in order to build the audience for poetry events. She is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Colorado State University. After many years as a community organizer, she still believes in the power of words to unite and move people, including poets. Her two-word mantra is “Show up.”
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Jackie St. Joan with “How I Met Art Goodtimes”
Jacqueline St. Joan writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Her debut novel, My Sisters Made of Light, published by Press 53 in 2010, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in Literary Fiction. About that novel’s 2022 sequel, The Shawl of Midnight, published by Golden Antelope Press, the author Alexandra Fuller said, “St. Joan writes like she’s on a mission from God…A really timely and wonderful contribution to the human story.” Her book of poems, What Remains, was published by Turkey Buzzard Press and she was co-editor of the anthology, Beyond Portia: Women, Law and Literature in the United States, published by Northeastern University Press. It is a classic in its field and is owned by over 400 libraries around the world.
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Ruth Duffy with “Become the Bear”
I’m a girl from the north country who immigrated to the southwest in the late 1970s with a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin – Beer City. Although published rarely and sporadically, I continue to stash small poems and strange short stories in the bottom righthand drawer of my Goodwill desk.
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Michael Olschewsky with “plan B”
I lived 24 years on the east side of Cleveland OH, 11 years in Kayenta AZ, and 50 years in and around Nucla CO. Wait, that’s more years than my age. Like my poetry I seem to be in more than one place at a time. I’m just a big subatomic particle. Call me Mr. Otron.
Cantor Prize Honorable Mention
Mari Boyd with “on the interstate between wherever i was and wherever i’m supposed to be now”
Mariposa Boyd is a writer, performing artist, and coach currently based out of Brooklyn, NY. Her work is inspired by her childhood in the Colorado Rockies and the years of travel, love, and spiritual exploration that have followed. More of her work can be found at her website www.mariposaboyd.com and on her instagram @avel.poetry.
