Introducing our next season of poetry books
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
WASHINGTON WRITERS’ PUBLISHING HOUSE ANNOUNCES
THE WINNERS OF ITS 2025 POETRY PRIZES:
NOTIFICATIONS ON by Emily Holland, winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize
WORK SONG by Jason Gebhardt, winner of the 50th Anniversary Editor’s Prize
ZARPAMOS by Guadalupe Ángela, translated by Yael Kiken, winner of the
Poetry in Translation Prize
The Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, will publish a record three award-winning collections selected from submissions to its annual poetry contest and its biennial translation contest for poets from Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Each collection will be awarded $1,500 and publication in January of 2027. These were all judged blind by past winners of the press, a unique aspect of the cooperative publishing model on which WWPH operates. The 2025 poetry winners are:
NOTIFICATIONS ON by Emily Holland is the winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Holland (they/she) is a genderqueer lesbian writer living in Baltimore. Their work appears in publications including HAD, Shenandoah, DIALOGIST, Little Patuxent Review, and Black Warrior Review. She is the author of the chapbook Lineage (dancing girl press, 2019) and the recipient of multiple fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 2023, they served as the Chair of Outwrite, DC’s LGBTQIA+ literary festival. She currently teaches creative writing at the George Washington University. They are also the Executive Editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal, and the Communications Manager at The Writer’s Center.
“Emily Holland’s Notifications On is a wonderfully textured, imminently heartfelt, and deftly crafted debut. Each poem reminds us how to allow intimacy into our everyday, booked-and-busy lives.” —Steven Leyva, author of The Opposite of Cruelty (Blair Publishing) and The Understudy’s Handbook (Washington Writers’ Publishing House).
WORK SONG by Jason Gebhardt is the winner of a special one-time 50th Anniversary Editor’s Prize. Jason Gebhardt’s poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, and Tar River Poetry, and his chapbook Good Housekeeping won the 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Prize. He is the recipient of multiple artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family and works as a preschool teacher.
“Jason Gebhardt’s Work Song is a book about paying attention, about the seemingly unremarkable moments and places that our minds return to again and again. The domesticated goldfish swimming in its bowl, the stranger blurred in the background of a family photo, the flyover states, the rooms we have forgotten in the backdrop of our lives, the child we lost to a failed pregnancy, who makes more precious the one who was born. This is a book of the small writ large, the accidental moments that shape our lives.” – Holly Karapetkova, Vice President, Poetry at WWPH, and award-winning author of Dear Empire (Gunpowder Press) and Words We Might One Day Say (Washington Writers’ Publishing House).
We are pleased to share the Finalists in the Poetry category:
Rooms in an Abandoned Hotel by Aaron Angello
When You Need It Most by Naomi Ayala
The Palestinian Moon by Kim A. Jensen
Stone Deep by John Nieves
pushing pixels by Nat Raum
A Migrant’s Way to Name a Loss He Cannot Pronounce by Nnadi Samuel
ZARPAMOS by Guadalupe Ángela, translated by Yael Kiken, winner of the Poetry in Translation Prize, is the winner of the first WWPH biennial Translation Prize, this year awarded in poetry. Zarpamos is an anthology collecting the work of the prolific Oaxacan poet Guadalupe Ángela. Kiken is a professor and poetry translator. She studied literature at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University and has taught writing in many classrooms. Some favorite opportunities include: leading spoken word workshops with DCPS elementary schoolers, teaching students at DC and Michigan correctional facilities, instructing third grade in Cortes, Honduras, co-leading translation workshops in Oaxaca, Mexico, and teaching with the New England Literature Program and Community Scholars Program. She currently teaches writing at Howard University and lives with her family in Washington, DC.
“I admire the craft in this manuscript—the choices, the act of translating. The poems are carefully rendered and lyrical. The manuscript is complete in its narrative arc and depth.” –Jona Colson, co-president/poetry editor at WWPH and translator of AGUAS by Miguel Avero, the first work in translation from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, published in 2024.
We are pleased also to share the Finalist for WWPH’s first biennial Translation Prize: No Need to Know the End by Moon Chung-hee translated by Young-Key Kim-Renaud.
The announcement of these three poetry collections also marks a year in which WWPH published its most ambitious anthology to date, AMERICA’S FUTURE: poetry & prose in response to tomorrow, edited by Caroline Bock and Jona Colson, which features 164 writers in 179 works over 576 pages. Published on September 9, it is now available in trade paperback and ebook.
The Washington Writers’ Publishing House will reopen for full-length manuscript submissions in May of 2026 in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction (memoir or essay). As the longest continuously operating cooperative nonprofit (501 (c) (3)) literary press in the United States, the Washington Writers’ Publishing House is committed to publishing and celebrating the rich diversity of voices within its regional footprint, which includes DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Its bi-weekly online journal, WWPH Writes, now a paying market, is open for submissions, and interested writers and readers are encouraged to subscribe to this free lit journal.
Please note: our FICTION Winner and Finalists for our 2025 WWPH Fiction Award will be announced on or about November 1st.