All ten finalists and their winning poems are:
First Place Winner: Matt Bernier, Pittsfield, "Death of a Fox"
Second Place Winner: Nancy Sobanik, Lyman, "Falling Birds"
Third Place Winner: Alice Haines, Auburn, "At the Kitchen Table"
Honorable Mention: Erika Arthur, Freedom, "Sea Scallop (Casco Bay)"
Honorable Mention: Katherine Norton, Long Island, Maine, "SHARING THE KALE"
Finalists:
Erin Covey-Smith, Freeport, "Library"
Lenora Jackson, Rockland, "The Chemical Queen of Long Island"
Jeanne Julian, South Portland, "The child I never had should know"
Anne Rankin, Brunswick, "Pattern of Barely"
Rhea Côté Robbins, Brewer, "Curse of the Purse"
Kirun Kapur is a poet, editor, teacher and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Julie Suk Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015) which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). She is currently at work co-editing and co-translating an anthology of contemporary poetry written in Arabic by women poets. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and Brandeis University, and has been granted fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell Colony. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program. Kapur grew up between Honolulu and New Delhi and now lives north of Boston. To learn more, visit her at kirunkapur.com.