Congratulations to the Winners of the 2025 National Poetry Series Open Competition! Posted in: News
From left: Hajjar Baban, Stephanie Horvath, Weston Morrow, Kira Alexis Tucker, and Yi Wei
The National Poetry Series congratulates the five winners of the 2025 National Poetry Series Open Competition:
LOW FLYING PLANES by Hajjar Baban
Chosen by Jake Skeets for Milkweed Editions
Field of Vision by Stephanie Horvath
Chosen by Elisa Gonzalez for Penguin
Cloud Builder by Weston Morrow
Chosen by Ariana Benson for University of Georgia Press
Wildest by Kira Alexis Tucker
Chosen by Siwar Masannat for Akashic Books
Diary by Yi Wei
Chosen by Sasha Roque Pimentel for Beacon Press
About the Poets
Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize in poetry, she has poems appearing in and forthcoming from The Schooner, Sundog Lit, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, where she won the 2025 Poetry Contest, selected by Hieu Minh Nguyen. Baban is a co-founder of the Kurdish Poets Collective. LOW FLYING PLANES is her first full length book of poems.
Stephanie Horvath’s poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She lives in Northern California and is currently a 2024-2026 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Weston Morrow is a poet, teacher, and former print journalist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MA in English Literature from Central Washington University. From Tacoma, Washington, he teaches at The Ohio State University and can be found online at www.westonmorrow.com.
Kira Alexis Tucker is a Memphis-born, Chicago-based artist exploring dreamscapes and haunted ecologies. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. Kira earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Northwestern University, where she taught in the Department of English as the 2024-2025 Artist in Residence. A former managing editor of TriQuarterly, she was selected as a finalist for a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Wildest is Kira’s poetic debut.
Yi Wei is a Chinese writer and visual artist unconditionally supportive of Palestinian resistance and liberation. She is invested in the struggle of the Global South.
Finalists
Kimberly Andrews, The Lake
E. G. Asher, Sky Shadow Mirror
E. C. Belli, Appendix: A Dissertation in Verse
Emily Brown, Except Maybe I Love You
Michael Chang, romance XXL
Jade Cho, Paper Feathers
Charlie Clark, Devil Music
Eli Dunham, Hearts Are Hearts Except Mine
Adam Edelman, Drift Signals
C. D. Eskilson, Life with Wings
Noah Falck, Fatigue Performance
Tin Fogdall, Single Wire Earth Return
Jen Frantz, Enjoy Your Snack
David Gorin, A Pale Green Star
Sadia Hassan, understory
James Haug, Cloud Diary
Dana Isokawa, Indirect Objects
Carrie Johnson, What Survives is the Work
L. A. Johnson, To Arrive in the Blue Country
Michal Jones, of blue & bone
Trevor Ketner, The Eulefrau
Vi Khi Nao, Reverse Abyss
L.S. Klatt, Sudden Eruptions of the Paper Planet
Tuck Ledbetter, Interstate Commerce
Diana Keren Lee, How to Cast a Beautiful Animal
Alonso LLerena, La Casa Roja
Maja Lukic, The Moon is a Pale Telephone
Johanna Magin, Against Reason
Leslie Miller, Derrida’s Cat
Katie Naughton, Debt Ritual
Ty Newcomb, sense/flutter/rattle
Nicholas Ng, Invention of the Wheel
JoAnna Novak, My Kaufman Weekend
Sara Lupita Olivares, Beam
Kara Olson, The Order of Blooming
Allison Pitinii Davis, Outskirts
Patty Seyburn, Inventing the Ladle
Glenn Shaheen, Chrome Pig
Amy Thatcher, Rick James in the Garden of Eden
Kyle W, Dead dog under the radiator
Sydney Westley, Trans-Electronic Music
Jeff Whitney, King for a Day
Emily Wolahan, When the Thread Breaks, the Story’s Over
A Zarif, Hand on My Heart, Time Is a Ladder with a Childlike Face