Winners and Finalists of the 2019 Previously Published Poem Prize!

We are honored to share with everyone the winners and finalists of the 2019 Previously Published Poem Prize!

Our team had a such difficult time choosing from all the exceptional submissions, all read blind, but in the end, we’ve selected Nicole Rollender to take the $2500 prize. Congratulations to Nicole, and to all of our winners and finalists!

Winners of the 2019 Previously Published Poem Prize

1st — Nicole Rollender, for The Luster of Everything I’m Already Forgetting” (originally published in Gigantic Sequins and to be republished on February 19th)

A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press), and four poetry chapbooks. She has won poetry prizes from Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal, Princemere Journal and Ruminate Magazine, and her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, and Ninth Letter. Nicole is managing editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal, and holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University.

2nd — Leila Chatti, for “What Will Happen” (originally published in Indiana Review and to be republished on February 12th)

Leila Chatti is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020, and the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, and the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, among others, and appear in Best New Poets (2015 & 2017), Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and other journals and anthologies. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

3rd — Isabella DeSendi, for “America’s First Female Muslim Judge Found Floating in a River” (originally published in Narrative and to be republished on February 4th)

Isabella DeSendi is a Cuban-Italian poet and educator whose work has been published in Narrative, Leveler, Small Orange, Two Peach, The Ekphrastic Review, and more. Her Chapbook “Through the New Body” recently won the Poetry Society of America’s 2019 Chapbook Fellowship and is forthcoming in Spring 2020. Isabella was also selected as a finalist for The 2019 Frontier Digital Poetry Chapbook contest, and has been named a finalist for the June Jordan Fellowship and Narrative Magazine’s Annual Poetry Prize. Isabella is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship and holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in New York City where she currently resides and works in finance.

Finalists

Lillian Bertram for “True Story”
Hannah Perrin King for “The Architecture of Descending”
Victoria Kohn Michels for “Abilene”
Trace DePass for “Self-portrait as the space between us”
Steve Bellin-Oka for “Survivor’s Guilt”
Victoria Lynne McCoy for “First Catch”
Yolanda Franklin for “Bop: Autobiography of a Jukebox or Five Ways to Kill a Gardenia”