News

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that final judge Nikky Finney has chosen Sydney Mayes’s "Golden Glosa with My Hand Atop My Mother’s” as the winner of the 2025 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry.

Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. She is the inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, The Hopkins Review, and Poets.org among other publications. A two-time Pushcart nominee, Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers' Conference, Community of Writers, Lighthouse Writers and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

Of Mayes’s poem Nikky Finney writes, “This incredible poem sees into its focal moment with the greatest of clarity, attention to detail, and astonishing matrilineal love. The architect of these words is rich in their understanding of the precious moment they have dipped the reader into. Their deep desire to build a worthy and creative vessel for our travel is levitational. A Golden Glosa takes us there. The memory of the beautician-mother teaching the poet-daughter is the engine, Tretheway’s epigraph is the oil running through the metal/mettle of memory, but the poet composes the journey with an incredible veracity of memorable verbs and a keen understanding of the power of an opening line that whispers all the way through and ultimately suspends us in the air, most especially just before they hurl us into the magnolia “Blue Magic” aroma of this simile:

She taught me the art of/ the silk press, the stiletto nail, to blow on wig glue,/like my mouth was trying to drive/ the buffalo from the great plains.

It is a woman’s poem, a daughter’s poem, a poem of seeking and permission that I
believe Adrienne Rich would hold in her glorious poetic hands and wave in the air while continuing to insist that all is not lost between us."

Along with naming the winner, Finney selected three finalists, Danielle Shandiin Emerson for "Epic-yazhí of a retired Red Valley Cowboy" and Angela Narciso Torres for "Grief Triptych Beginning with a Line from Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary.”
The editors also selected as semi-finalists Cortney Lamar Charleston’s "Igbo Landing" and "Revival,” Kate O'Donoghue’s "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Clara-Læila Laudette’s "Emetic for the modern coward," Betsy Mitchell Martinez’s "Honors History,” Valencia Robin’s “"Lt. Uhura, Communications Officer, Star Trek" and Lisbeth White’s "Feed Store".
The winning poem will appear in an upcoming issue of the BPJ.

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We’re grateful to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and to all who submitted poems for this year’s contest.

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