2025 Palette Poetry Prize: Winners & Finalists
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2025 Palette Poetry Prize! Please join us in congratulating these wonderful poets. Deep gratitude to all who shared thrilling poems with us—we are so lucky to have been immersed in the worlds of your work. The winning poem and runner-ups were selected by Palette‘s editors and are published on the Palette website.
Winners of the 2025 Palette Poetry Prize
1st place — c. melín lara for “A SYSTEM OF EQUATIONS WITH ■ AS PROXY”
c. melín lara a.k.a Car Lara is a Queens, NYC (Lenapehoking) born multidisciplinary artist and experimental writer of Mexican and Honduran heritage. A recipient of the 2024–25 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship at the Poetry Project, their bilingual work explores transculturality and mythic-domestic entanglements by way of translation play, verses shaped by typographic symbols and asemic transliterations. Believing in a poetry-art intersection, they also integrate the mediums of ceramics, collage, illustration, and occasionally, sonic performance into their practice. Their work has appeared in Fine Print Press, Noir Sauna, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and is forthcoming in ANMLY.
2nd place — Thomas Guo for “by the pond”
Thomas Guo is a high school senior from San Jose. Their work has been previously recognized and published by JUST POETRY, Scholastic Writing Awards, and DePaul’s Blue Book. He enjoys writing in both poetry and flash fiction. In his free time, he loves to play basketball at his nearby park.
3rd place — Zachariah Claypole White for “The Angel Runs for Office”
Zachariah Claypole White is a Philadelphia-based writer and educator, originally from North Carolina. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where he was a Jane Cooper Poetry Fellow. His work has appeared in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Prairie Schooner, Strange Horizons, and The Rumpus, among others. Zachariah has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Writer’s Digest, and Disquiet International. His awards include Flying South‘s poetry prize as well as two nominations for the Best of the Net and one for a Pushcart Prize. Zachariah teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia, Saint Joseph’s University, and the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. You can find more of his work at zachariahclaypolewhite.com.
Finalists
Ayomide Bayowa
Justin Blanckensee
Jomil Ebro
Jed Myers
Elizabeth Pérez
Emily Tong
Natalie Wee
Longlist
Aliza Abusch-Magder
Emma Baldwin
Victor Basta
Robert Blenis
Destiny Crockett
Tianyi Duanmu
Jean Fleischauer
Lauren Geiser
Darrel Alejandro Holnes
G.R. Kramer
Cynthia Manick
David Moolten
Oak Morse
Tyler Patton
Ramsey Tawfick
Tessa Shea Whitehead