Vertical Divider

Results of the 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York


AUGUST 4, 2025    |    CONTEST RESULTS





Vertical Divider

The editors of Southern Humanities Review are proud to announce the results of our twelfth annual poetry contest honoring the late Jake Adam York, award-winning poet and alumnus of Auburn University’s creative writing program. This year’s final judge—celebrated poet Nicole Sealey—selected our winner. The winner, runners-up, and finalists will appear together in Volume 58.3, which will be published in the Fall of 2025.

The poems and poets honored this year are preceded by an outstanding collection of work from our 2014 - 2024 Auburn Witness Poetry Prizes. Learn more about Jake Adam York, our prize, and past winners here.


WINNER

Hana Widerman

for her poem “Collage of Wreckage”

Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, Hana Widerman is a poet originally from California. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English and creative writing and won the James Richardson Award in Poetry. She is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where she received her MFA. A two-time winner of Cornell’s George Harmon Coxe Poetry Prize, her poetry has been longlisted in The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition and appears or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Washington Square Review, The Offing, RHINO, Pleiades, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been supported by the Saltonstall Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where she was awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Participant Scholarship in Poetry.

OUR WINNER RECEIVES $1,000 AND WILL PARTICIPATE IN A READING PRESENTED BY THE JULE COLLINS SMITH MUSEUM OF FINE ART AT AUBURN UNIVERSITY THIS OCTOBER TO READ HER POETRY ALONGSIDE CONTEST JUDGE NICOLE SEALEY.



RUNNERS-UP

Leila Farjami   “More Than a Dirge”
Caroline Harper New   “The Aquariums Keep Exploding”


FINALISTS

Heather Jessen   “Autumnal Poem with War in It”
Maggie Nipps   “Vantage”
Janice Lobo Sapigao   “On Muscle Memory”
Ellen Sazzman   “To Plait Another's Hair”
Ajibola Tolase   “Mississippi Goddamn”
Issam Zineh   “History”


OUR RUNNERS-UP AND FINALISTS WILL HAVE THEIR WORK PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 58.3 ALONGSIDE THE CONTEST'S WINNER.


ADVERTISEMENT