2025 Award Winner
In the Salt
by Caitlin Dwyer
Our judge Bethany Reid has selected In the Salt by Caitlin Dwyer as winner of the 2025 Sally Albiso Award.
“I was astonished by the daring and virtuosity of this collection. In the Salt is part love song to a child, part homage to Homer’s Penelope waiting for Odysseus. If “Motherhood is a kind of wildness, a loosening,” we find in these poems a painful, tentative hope, the world pulled to tatters by crisis, each morning the threads taken up again.”
Runner Up
Don’t Ask Me How I Know
by Michele Bombardier
Judge’s comments: “These poems navigate the terrain of what appears to be an ordinary life, weddings, children, loss of parents. The magic of the language and images lift us—I feel something bird within me / some lift of wing”—into the extraordinary.”
Joanne Allred
Terri Cohlene
Tim Gillespie
Brandon Lewis
Michael Magee
Linda Martin
Jed Myers
Rena Priest
Mary Ellen Talley
Melody Wilson
Finalists
Friends, You Drank the DarknessA Conspiracy of Blackbirds
Not Yet Finished
The Mended Animal
Crowed
If Telemachus Had Been a Girl Like Me
Can’t Be Far
Dancing to the Ticking of the Doomsday Clock
Doris Day Was My Hero
Stiff as Tinsel
Ted McMahon
Tim Murphy
Muriel Nelson
Kathleen O'Brien
Pattie Palmer-Baker
Jacob Salzer
Scott Starbuck
Ira Stollak
Mark Strohschein
Betsy Fogleman Tighe
Sonya Wohletz
Honorable Mention
Debby BacharachPamela Carter
Riley Danvers
Cory Eberhart
Jeff Fearnside
Laura Garrard
Trina Gaynon
Sigrun Susan Lane
Sue Fagalde Lick
Lauren Mallett
Brandy McKenzie
We deeply regret that we lack the resources to publish the myriad beautiful truths of all the submitted poetry collections. May each one make its way into the world!
MoonPath Press is an imprint of Concrete Wolf