2025 Academy of American Poets College Prize: Winner and Honorable Mentions Announced
2025 Academy of American Poets College Prize
Winner and Honorable Mentions
Congratulations to this year’s winner of the 2025 Academy of American Poets Prize Contest, Kinsale Drake, and to the students receiving honorable mentions for their work, Lana Reeves and Christiana Castillo.
Winner:
Kinsale Drake, GS, MFA, for “Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory, 1938”
Honorable Mentions:
Lana Reeves, GS, MFA for “How to Love a Sinking Island”
Christiana Castillo, GS, MFA for “Texas Man Arrested For Trying To Rescue Thicc Latinas From Ice Detention Facility”
Judge:
Marissa Davis (BA ’17), author of End of Empire (2025).
Judge’s Remarks:
So many elements come together to lend a poem its particular grace. The most striking poems, to me, are those whose language seems to reveal a balancing act between authorial intention and a sacred communion with the poem itself. This poem embraces just that as it unfurls itself, couplet after couplet, paced by striking line breaks, magnificently crafted images of (seemingly) simplistic moments, and the tensions built by and hanging between words (“tea” follows “blood”, “gaping” follows “creamy”). It feels painted onto the page, brushstroke by brushstroke–until it arrives at the lightning bolt of a final line which lands, stuns, and forces us back to the title with a fresh and harrowing understanding.
About the Judge:
Marissa Davis (BA ’17) is the author of End of Empire (Penguin, 2025) and My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020), chosen by Danez Smith for Cave Canem’s Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Her writing has received several honors, including a Tin House scholarship, a Rona Jaffe fellowship, and publication in Best New Poets. She has previously served as a judge for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Previous winners include Sydney Mayes (2024), Caroline Stevens (2023, 2022), Maria Isabelle Carlos (2021), Hayes Cooper (2020), Carlina Duan (2019), and Joshua Moore (2018).