2025 Love & Eros Prize: Winners & Finalists
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2025 Love & Eros Prize! Please join us in congratulating these wonderful poets. We’re deeply grateful to all who shared moving 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 guest judge Sun Yung Shin and are published on the Palette website.
Winners of the 2025 Love & Eros Prize
1st place — Harrison Hamm for “Vanitas: Half Skull, Orchid, Gecko”
Harrison Hamm is a writer and educator from rural West Tennessee. His debut chapbook, If It’s Country Music You Want, won the 2025 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and will be published in 2026. A 2025 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Hamm’s writing appears in Best New Poets, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, The Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and more. In 2027, he will earn an MFA in Creative Writing at NYU as a Goldwater Writing Workshop Fellow.
2nd place — Kailey Giordano for “Daphne, 1958”
Kailey Giordano is a humanities educator based in Montana. Her work has appeared in publications from The Jay DeFeo Foundation and Palette Poetry. Her chapbook Waiting in the Stone is forthcoming from Cathexis Northwest Press.
3rd place — Tina Blade for “Septuagenarian Abecedarian Love Song”
Tina Blade’s work was selected for publication in Best New Poets of 2023; she is also a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poems have appeared in Apple Valley Review, Green Hill Literary Lantern, The Moth, Bracken, Sweet Tree Review, Pontoon Poetry, Calyx, Mid-American Review, Seattle’s 2025 Poetry in Public program, and elsewhere. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon and currently lives in Duvall, Washington, just east of Seattle in the Snoqualmie River Valley.
Finalists
Maha Abdelwahab
Alisha Brown
Jenevieve Carlyn
Trinity Catlin
Trace DePass
Robert Garza
Allison Norwood
Longlist
Kelli Russell Agodon
Susan Alexander
Bryan Barfield
Lisa Bass
Bridget Bell
Soumita Bhattacharya
Leia Bradley
Miguel Paolo Celestial
Jason DiMedio
S R Ekstein
Addie Eliades
Terry Hall
Darrel Alejandro Holnes
Mickie Kennedy
Sabina Khan-Ibarra
Mary Lee
Carol Rose Little
Svetlana Litvinchuk
Robert MacLean
Dawn McGuire
Marco Patitucci
Rama K. Ramaswamy
Whitney Rio-Ross
Neko Ross
Terese Säljö
Jack Stewart
Tammy Vitale
Kelsey Wiora
eric wittkopf
Grace Yu