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Awards

Since 2021, Mass Poetry has been proud to open the Festival with a poem submitted by a community member. The 2025 First Poem Contest opened January 1st to March 15th. The winner of the contest, as well as honorable mentions and longlist poets, were invited to join us live to open a Festival headline event. The winner received a $250 prize, ($50 for honorable mentions). In 2025, the contest will be judged by Salem Poet Laureate J.D. Scrimgeour. The contest was open to any writer who lives, or has previously lived, in New England. There was a $10 fee, which supported the Festival and the contest, but a fee-free option was available for students or anyone for whom the entry fee would present a barrier. The 2023 winner and honorable mentions were chosen by Guest Judge Charles Coe. 2021 was guest judged by Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Weir).


In 2021 and 2023, Mass Poetry hosted the Mass Poetry Community Awards Celebration, recognizing poets from across the state deserving of acclaim for their work, organizing, and other contributions to poetry in our fine state! Stay tuned for news about 2025 nominations and awards.


Mass Poetry Community Award Winners

2025 Winners: Stay tuned this fall!

2023 Winners: Binx Perino, Cheryl Bonin, Dariana Guerrero, Dave Somerset, Dianne C. Braley, Elizabeth Gordon McKim, Hilary Sallick, J.D. Debris, Jasmine Boyd-Perry, Kaleigh O’Keefe, Kathleen Aguero, Katya Zinn, Kay Marlow Allen, Mary Pinard, Matthew E. Henry (MEH), Monica McAlpine, Myles Taylor, Nidia Hernández, Salman Hussain, Sarah Levine, Tom Driscoll, Eileen Cleary, Julia Lisella, Lesléa Newman, Mary Buchinger, Prema Bangera, Amanda Shea, Donna Latvis & Timothy Gager

2021 Winners: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Toni Bee, Heather Treseler, Dur-e-Maknoon Ahmed, Susan Roney-O’Brien, Lesléa Newman, Kip Wilson, Marjorie Maddox, Karina Borowicz, Stephan Delbos, Maru Colbert, Elizabeth S. Wolf, Joshua Coben, Margot Douaihy

The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest 

Congratulations to the winners of our First Poem Contest! The poems were selected by guest Judge J.D. Scrimgeour. The poems are posted below and the poets read their work at our Festival’s opening event! Thank you to everyone who submitted!

Winner 

“love poem in the form of a lesson plan” 

By Anna Deloia

welcome          welcome!
welcome: there are snacks along the wall
and you can help yourself any time.
you can make any noises
that feel good. you can stretch
out like a planet on the rug.
are we ready? today, we are going to make
a road by lying in the grass
until it grows around our bodies.
it might take a while. you can take a nap
if you need to. do a little wiggle.
today, we are going to make 8.2 billion
pairs of glasses. we’ll start with the bottom windows
of the skyscrapers, and no one will notice
at the tops. we are going to unpick the maps
to find out who they serve. ask the borders:
what else will you be?           what else will you be?
I’m sorry, I don’t have the answers. I have granola bars.
come with me to the bookshelf and let’s pull
everything down! you can make a mess.
you can say shit and fuck all this!
tell your neighbor they deserve the world
but not this one. I know you’ve seen the videos.
tell me: is what you remember most the child
or the gun? tell me: is there still a reason
for utopia? if we stuff it in a quilt, will it keep us warm?
if we shove it in the ground, will it form a spring?
this is not a test: you can ask your grandma. you can ask
a drag queen. you can ask the kid with eyes wide and hands
everywhere. do a another, medium-sized wiggle.
today, we are going to make the screens back into sand.
today, we are going to make the books back into birds. is it true what Wendell said: there are no unsacred places, only
sacred places and desecrated places?
there will not be any homework.
you can sing to yourself in whatever languages
you mourn in. you can run away.
you can yell at me; I’ll be here.
you can look at your phone – but try not to
doom-scroll. you can watch the planes.
you can ask them to stop shooting.
it might take a while.            you can take a break
whenever you need to.

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Anna Lucia Deloia is a White, queer writer, educator, and researcher. She has a PhD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she is co-founder of the intergenerational education initiative Imagining More Just Futures. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Midway Journal, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Love is For All of Us [Storey Publishing]. Her debut poetry chapbook, of god and merriment both, is available from Bottlecap Press.

Honorable Mentions 

“Afterlife”

By Theadora Siranian

I prostrate myself before you, world that has made me
mediocre. My face again peeled and left by the door, I am
down on all fours at dusk—the only animal in a darkening room.

In my twenties I once stepped from my apartment into the rain
and for a moment a crushed beer can on the sidewalk
was a dead bird, tiny and slick, and my guts dropped in terror.

I’ve been trying to write about it this entire time—that brief
moment when the uncanny overcame all sense. World, I acquit
my ego. I ablate myself, my silly little arrogant self. I am ugly

and I am humbled and I have finally learned to lie. I am nothing
but a creature ensnared, hobbled by my basest desires. When I
was fifteen my father and I walked into a beachside tourist shop

and straight into a table display of baby shark corpses encased
in jars. The memory makes me so sick I’ve never been able
to say it aloud before now. Language is insufficient. Watching

my father watch me—the indescribable look on his face.
At first sight I had thought they were only candy. I want now,
world, to be surprised by nothing. To not halt walking

to work the morning after the election in amazement
of the steeplejack still leaning his spindly ladder against
the tambour of the orthodox church, still preparing

for his climb to repair the onion dome painted the exact
aching hue as the crystalline heavens pinned mercilessly
behind. I somehow could not but stop and marvel. Damn you.

I am still beleaguered by ceaseless, wanton longing—
I do not want to endure this alone. This world estranged
from logic, so fucking inhospitable to love. And my heart,

once a thumping fist, now just a grimy palm begging.

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Theadora Siranian is a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Review, CONSEQUENCE Magazine, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2013, she was a finalist for The Poet’s Billow Pangaea Prize, and in 2014 was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small Orange Journal. Her chapbook, She, was released by Seven Kitchens Press in May 2021.

 

“New Neighbors”

By Amy Rothschild

Scribbled with green milkweed and gold foxtails,
three purple flowers, uncommonly purple,


violet and magenta, open like delicate horns,
crane toward the street which is sunlight.


They come from next door’s scraggly thicket,
before that, bellies of ships and hulls of birds,


warm soil of pink and orange tropics.
Scientific name Ipomoea, family Convolvulaceae.


The stories the morning glories and I could tell,
generations thrust toward Eastern Massachusetts,


dry patch of yard, a porch green like dull ocean.
Small talk thick with the bristle of politics and religion.


A woodpecker harmonizes with a jackhammer.
At the end of our street, rusty dinosaurs


drop a grumble and plunk of steel beams
becoming office park, becoming biotech.


How to explain to the morning glories
the soon silver palace.


How people will pour into those dark startups
like sunlight.


How the startups will have names
like Ipomea.

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Amy Wise Rothschild’s poetry has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, ONEART, and Maudlin House, among others. Her creative non-fiction is forthcoming in The Potomac Review and Unbroken. The 2024 winner of the Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Poetry, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Longlist 

“Closer Than Skin”

By Janet Aalfs

Although they are

Only breath…
                 Sappho


I watched my sister at the ceilidh

embrace a woman closer than skin

home from college then gone again

she left behind in a book

three syllables that dared

though only breath to shimmer

like wind through a door ajar

blows it open to the scent

of ocean mist and beach rose

I could hear when she returned

born again to save me from

lesbian that burning

her silence shattered

moonlit waves on sand

when she chose to end her song

silvery cobalt sound between

the breaking not a sound

but an echo from her wings

softer than the softest flower

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Janet E. Aalfs, poet laureate of Northampton, MA (2003-2005), and founder/director of Lotus Peace Arts at Heron’s Bridge, a non-profit community school, is a poet, performer, educator, dancer, and master instructor of Karate, Filipino Stick Arts, and Taiji/ Qigong. Creator of Poemotion, spoken word woven with martial arts based dance, Janet has been a presenter at many events including Mass Poetry, the Dodge Poetry Festival, Split This Rock, and Guga S’Thebe in Cape Town, South Africa. Janet’s third full-length poetry collection, What the Dead Want Me to Know, appeared in 2022. Her writing has been published widely.

“Western Mass”

By Gray Davidson Carroll

Here I am again, unable to write a poem without putting you at the center. Unable to write anything without the feeling of water around me. Without the rotting leaf & fermenting apple, the backroads leading nowhere & dust kicked up from forgotten farm fields. I cannot write this poem without the clay I gathered from the creek bed as a child, without the sugar maples we tapped for syrup or the dark blue truck that became, for a few short weeks each year, the Sap Ship carrying us to the next tree. Here, the pawpaw, the raspberries picked into used yogurt containers and blueberries eaten straight from the bush. Here too, the asparagus stands at the end of every driveway, the air smelling always of manure and dirt. Here, the public library open two days a week for a total of ten hours, the used bookstore I would lose myself in every day of summer. Here, summer days so hot everyone decides to skip work and go swimming instead. Here, the nude beach where the queers can be found every day of summer regardless of work. Here, skinny-dipping in February and ice frozen in my hair. Here, the hills I biked down at 6:00 am singing at the tops of my lungs. Hear the river, where I first learned my love of water. Here, the woodstove where I wrote my first poem. Here, the ball field, where, under a full moon, because this is a poem and the moon has to have been full, I kissed a man and for the first time, did not call myself unclean. Here, the lake I have come to after every heartbreak, the woods where I first saw my father cry. Here, my love, who calls me to say, drop whatever you’re doing and go look at the moon, and who has, somehow, put up with me writing love poems since the very first date and reading to them for hours on end. Here garlic cloves crushed and eaten whenever someone has a cold. Here, the stinging nettles my mother and I harvested each spring for pesto and tea, the taste of pre-dawn coffee and the way morning lifts itself, like a shawl from the mountains. And I cannot end this poem without the squelch of mud between my toes, without the stink of skunk cabbage, fluff from the milkweed pods or the root-beer-taste of black birch between teeth. I cannot end this poem without the smell of woodsmoke in my hair, without the cattails and dogbane, hemlocks and oak. I cannot end this poem without running into someone I know in the grocery store and stopping to talk for fifteen minutes no matter how much of a rush I am in. I cannot end this poem without the graveyard where I laid my virginity to rest, or the singers who have gathered on the town common for an hour every day since March of 2020 to remember, together, how to sing the soul back to the body. And I cannot end this poem with the garden of my body only now bursting into bloom. And I will not end this poem

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Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Common, ONLY POEMS, and elsewhere. They are a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, a CDC John R. Lewis Freedom Scholar, and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.

 

“I come from a line of women”

By Kristin Marie

I come from a long line of women
I come from a long line PT 2
PXL_20211004_182916578.PORTRAIT

Kristin Marie is a writer from New England whose poetry has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Cathexis Northwest, and an anthology by Purple Ink Press.

 

“To my mother”

By Carmen Barefield

To my mother
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Carmen Barefield (she/her) is a poet and writer living in Salem, Massachusetts. She is also a fellow of Roots. Wounds. Words. and The Watering Hole. Some of her work can be found in Voicemail Poems, The Elevation Review, Popshot Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, and Poetry Quarterly. You can find out more about her at carmenbarefield.com.

 

The 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest Winner

MassPo-2023-Day1-FaePhoenixPhoto-161

Susan Michele Coronel

When My Mother’s Hands Were Called

they trembled in the half-light, eclipsed the knowledge

     of ink on brush, the dry mandelbrot of her voice cracking.

Fingers stuffed in jean pockets, wrists flashed against

 

a crescent moon with the oven still on, paint pots

     uncovered, left to drip & dry. My mother was destined

to become a secretary but aspired to be an artist,

 

eventually settling on teacher, her knuckles

     once graceful, now diminished. She buried the birds

of possibility under an umbrella, curtained

 

them in wheat & marigold. As a young woman she listened

     with light on her face but talked to shadows,

picked up ruler, chalk & projector to compete

 

with screaming kids in her kindergarten class.

     I wondered why she wouldn’t adapt her own reflection,

not as puzzles or blocks or empty bursts, but scratches

 

of letters & numbers shallowing the water, Basquiating

     red & black across ceiling & floor. When she touched

windows, regret streaked across her hands as sweat,

 

hotter with new perception, but that didn’t change

    the outcome, palette simpering dry & monochrome.

Beads of water gathered speed, burst like lost loves.

 

How did she hold her sketches in their prisms?

     Can the heart of art be protected even if never created,

even if it once stuck to palms like catchweed?

 

She was tempted to return to hyacinth & grape globules

     but was inundated by distractions,

her own children drumming her back for attention,

 

swirling along the silver train of her skirt.

     A continuous cache of unused paint, dry & crumbling,

peeled off the walls as she warbled by the door,

 

never peeking through the keyhole of lilac & blackberry

     luster. Painting for herself was never an option,

no sliver of solace. Her gift had its limits

 

but it was never unwrapped, left to slip on the road’s

     long curve. The chains of pink faith hardened,

scratching the canvas like a blue phantom.

The 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest Honorable Mentions

Sam Moe

Back When the Deer Were Horses and the Horses Were Rivers

The air filling with blue smoke and blue horses whose breath

stokes the kindling, hooves upturning earth, they’re running

again through the streets and the back road paths, towards

 

your house with the faded wisteria creep, lilac and amber

in the rainstorm and you’re running out of cigarettes, left

your car window open again and someone’s cat has climbed

 

inside, warm and soft red seats reminiscent of a heart, how

many times we’ll walk next to each other through the pines

before your heart turns and burns into a crisp in the bonfire

 

your friends are cooler than me, wearing gold bead bracelets

necklaces layered and chokers coated in crescent moons, well

water used to reflect my eyes, now everything is green, soft

 

as satin goes, your faded elbows in your late father’s coat

I pretend to be your mother in the dim light of the kitchen

I am your sister and brother, too, your cat with the tuxedo fur

 

I am the company you keep, the worry at the back of your neck

we reach the deck close to dawn, the horses have turned into

swans with blue feathers and algae-coated beaks, did you know

 

the willow tree is an ecosystem feeding the edges of town

how long until you tell me you don’t love me anymore, who

do I think I am easy to be cared for, am I the host, maybe

 

hound with its muzzle dipped in the ground, problems with

teeth at my neck and my back memorizes the bark of a tree

we extinguish the farmer’s candle gardens, we climb the roof

 

we are daring and young and chain smoking deep into Saturday

I wish then daylight was around for long enough to save my

life. I wish I could outrun the river, become soft and sedated

 

the kind of being you’d leave and think, they’ll make it on their

own, their body fits perfectly into the doorway of evening and

when I finally disappear, all those years later, will you remember

 

to write to me, will you read my letters, here’s another, I try to

reach back through the legs and the haze, can you hear me

across ribcages and dry ice, buckets of headlights broken and

 

collected at the side of the road, amber rings the dead deer’s

head in a helmet, hooves so similar to that of a horse, antlers

shaking and coated in beads, I am reminded of the women, I am

 

reminded of the wounds, the city with its stretches then hums

when my family was still alive they would wave at me out the

balcony of the fourth floor, crying and letting go of their satin

 

handkerchiefs, the expensive kind, tucked away in the pockets

of guests and mourners, we are at the funeral for the animals

I want to bully myself into shrinking, I want to run across tracks

 

and turn into a dragonfly, maybe a rope, a promise, a crate of

oranges and peaches, messy and blessed as flesh, sour, stings

the place where you insert the dagger, this isn’t a song or a

 

secret tossed between ex-friends, this is my life force perched

on the edge of your windowsill, this is me clawing at the phone

booth doors, I’m already raging and ready to race, cross stables

 

fields of blooms, say it, how you prefer ravishing gardenias

even if I wanted to would I curb my face, cure the heat, sticky

flip flops of my youth discarded beneath plastic lawn chairs, we

 

throw streamers at the party, eat meat down to the bone, stay

up too late, do I tell you I miss you or do we collect smooth wet

rocks and small seashells discarded from the mussel mud, must

 

I sculpt the altar by myself, I don’t know how to make a priest

out of squirrel jaws and telephone wires and we all grieve them

the deer with their stories and points and stars, but no one knows

 

the real reason they keep running out into the road, even though

there is a history of danger and hitting, there is a consolation prize

there is sorry-sorry, a loss space inhabited by flower bearers and a

 

bishop from the next town over, his heart is a chamber where hide

liquids and bottle caps, enraptured cats, an entire arboretum and

then some, then we have to say goodbye to the horses, someone

 

must braid their manes, someone must take out the screws, soon

we are singing and losing, I am drying my veins out like frog rocks

you once told me to save my life, I couldn’t protect you even if I

 

tried to tear down the ribbons at the intersection of the statues, so

many words for sea and moon, not enough for loss or carve my

dear, save the bones for me, save your prayers, your shawls, your

 

sorries, I will slip in the secret space of love, I will rest until the

earth turns green and hot, screw the evidence, save me the ashes

from the rites, remind me that I can survive tough stuff, violence

 

and such is the crown on the head of the eldest buck, all red stains

but whose car was it and what happened to the river water, well

where do I return when the lights go out and the barn is sealed.

NNandi Samuel

A Boneyard of Flesh// Post-War Trauma

“my joy is a dead language”—KHALYPSO

1.

yet, a nameless gravestone rolled between cold war & now.

a maddened apparition, manifesting from the boys’ quarter of my pain, of each

bullet-eaten cave by the roadside—razed down to a crumpled papier-mâché.

 

my brother, ulcering out of my grip the way a blood-soaked font detaches

from the page of medical record as a pulsing illness, or a budding lump.

 

tonight stinks like an open sore. & in the wild gift of event, a scar

shapeshifts towards healing. violence scrawled in its wake.

& styling its way into turbulence—it thunders through a ribcage.

 

2.

there: the hurt, bruised to whitening. there: the chewed carnivorous

water—yawning a boneyard of flesh. the shore is language dead enough

to drown in, to squeeze to a thorough blot & punctuate with rumpled bodies

of my race. their negritude, whitewashed into effervescence.

our crude & grief-infested dialect like yellow bile, unsettling the tongue.

 

3.

post-war, a fragment of our surname drown in a bulletproof soil.

brother, deboning the wild knit of concrete. he yanks off a body from its loamy

existence, & the air reeks of Ma. a boy ago, he grieved the dry season

of his infancy into a bonfire with no bones to hawk the flame.

amusement parks grew less amusing—slaughter driven by the urgency

for blood. carousel, racing same way into the tummy of an ambulance.

 

4.

the killed are smuggled in body bags on trolley, headed for nowhere.

grief grows surplus & doubles over with loss. a lad, foisted to a

stretcher—brandishes his dislodged wrist 

& grieved a purple sore boomeranging everywhere across town.

 

what bullet colors my accent? the impact, too sporadic to chew a whole

lineage. what language meets a bomb halfway between beauty & boom?

 

5:

lights-out: a soft shadow loiters the lone street, scavenging the bloodshot

yard for tampon. & in a sleight of hand, unshelves a pregnancy test-kit.

a sergeant pounds her from behind—as if I mean, without a gun.

  

[prenatal]: she binged slowly on the fat bile of loss. gloom, trellising her insteps.

[postnatal]: she craved fish stew on empty cartridge, bullet-shaped torso of

a lamb—marred in gunpowder. see how sorrow makes a carnivore of us.

 

beware of me. grief burdens my core. a fetus once there has gone missing

& not one blood to show for it.

 

6.

say: the ancestors  have no hand in our woe. say: their spirit misjudge the bullet.

resurrect their ancient loin, for each fallen shape to plead in cold-blooded language.

say, I was the voice peeling the wind, there’s the probability you’d find me un-alived

by a missile or near miss, or vowel explosion. my tongue: a dead language.

 

phoneme, plastered to my cheek. its cruel alphabet—liquifying my gum,

as sadness foams in maritime rage.

the saltless blessing, roaming in my mouth like rotten carcass.

 

7.

in the year of disaster, your ghost come home to roost on the eve of May:

an earth-shattering sound—headed towards chaos. at the crack of dawn,

you’re a boar leaping toward light: a violence dead on arrival.

in a country that speaks fire, ‘my joy is a dead language.’

a dark accent, scrubbing grief on pink tongue.

the colonist’s verb keeps revamping more corners for us to die in.

 

I wear my mouth in reverse, & gun a pronoun down in one shot. cheers to

how we self-identify with hurt: a bullet for dodged bullet—in this ghastly language.

 

say, you find harm to outpace. thank the fitness of foot,

thank the femur & the calcium that fills it with tonight’s horse race.

 

8.

there, my dead relatives unfurling like a peeled chorus.

their unrehearsed glow—putting light to guesswork.

dear brother, happiness is a far cry from here, & at the rough edge lies

a matchet moon—the way the sky slit supplication into sore throat.

 

you shape out, voiceless from the onslaught.

see, what troubles your larynx: medieval’s wreckage.

a cannon ball, gunning for your lung.

2021 Winners:

Samn Stockwell of Barre, VT, “The Transmigration of Souls at the Donut Shop”

Samantha DeFlitch of Portsmouth, NH, “I am a Parking Chair” 

Emily Joan Cooper of Peabody, MA, “Upon Quitting My Job”