2026 Award Winner
Embraces
by Alice Derry, Port Angeles, WA
Our judge Annette Sisson has selected Embraces by Alice Derry as winner of the 2026 Sally Albiso Award.
“Some Words about Love” and “Framed by Fire,” two section titles in Embraces, point to the collection’s defining motifs: love and fire. These poems attest to the brightness of our most cherished relationships and the flames that may consume a beloved home but cannot destroy the love for a deceased partner, nor the love that kindles new buds of family. Steeped in mystery, compassion, and keenly observed imagery, this poet’s facility with language is steady, offering readers an experience rich with surprise and discovery—the kind of discovery the speaker herself longs to make in the poem “Color”: “When I sit by the lake . . ./ I can’t understand/ color’s tongue, how bark speaks. . . ./ I want this wild to infuse me . . ./ these idioms I’m trying to enter.” Or as she writes in “Where Brightness Pours,” speaking ostensibly to her lost husband, but also to the reader: “I want you to imagine it/ as I imagine you every day,/ fire in your dark eyes.” Embraces testifies, again and again, that love is the fire that endures.
1st Runner Up
You Can’t See How You Shine
by Pam Crow
Judge’s comments: The opening poem ends with the speaker and her daughter pushing quarters into an antiquated vending machine, pulling out sodas, and vowing to “drink this effervescence as slowly as we can.” Later, the poem “Opening” concludes: “Life spins and spins and we rattle against/ invisible walls, not remembering/ every stone, every weed is . . . / an opening through which we pass.” Strikingly accessible in language and voice, You Can’t See How You Shine deftly reveals how to observe and savor even the wet ground “where/ every scent has its own taste, its own color.”
2nd Runner Up
The Empty Space Like an Ocean
by Amelia Diaz Ettinger
Judge’s comments: The Empty Space Like an Ocean offers a highly cohesive imagining of a daughter abducted by her father—her mother reduced to an absence, a wound, a site of intense longing. And this separation is magnified by social differences and cultural prejudices. The collection gestures toward reconnection, but the pain of estrangement—of an “empty space like an ocean”—is never fully assuaged though the speaker endeavors to learn, and to teach the next generation, “how to love the sea.”
Louhi Pohjola
Patrick Dixon
Garnet Juniper Bennet
Joanne M. Clarkson
Penelope Scambly Schott
Cliff Taylor
Heidi Seaborn
Kathryn Hunt
Timothy Kelly
Finalists
All the EarthAll the Furious Color
angel / androgyne
The Ghosts of Beautiful Selves
Harvest
The Neverending Powwow
Night Sweats
Paper Boat
Sung Psalms
Logan Garner
Judith Waller Carroll
Sigrun Susan Lane
Hailey Summer
Tim Roos
John Morrison
Michael Haeflinger
Daniel Edward Moore
Martin Middlewood
Amanda Powell
Yvonne Higgins Leach
Debby Bacharach
Robert Keeler
Colette Cosner
Connie Soper
Dianne Knox
Penelope Schott
Lucas Wildner
Mary Salisbury
James Konsmo
Riley Danvers
Mark Thalman
Lauren Davis
Laurie Blauner
Loretta Tobin
Doniell Cushman
Scott Starbuck
Kerry J Heckman
Honorable Mention
Boar's Head GospelThe Children Are Crying and a Dog's at the Door
A Country of Mist
The Escapist Diaries
Feather
game called ghost
Golden Root and Limb
The Interior Design of Shadows
Lifting the Moon
The Night of That Day
Of Hooves and Hands
Oh, the Body!
The Oil Fields of Tibu
Party, Come as Voyager
Rain Repeats Itself
Salish Sea Slants
Sayeth the Old Lady
Servus
Set Sail
Slanted Shadows
Sonnets for Post-Divorce Photosynthesis
Teaching Seventh Grade
The Sun's Stolen Work
There Was Once Another Person Here
War Echoes
Watch Out for Us Pentecostal Girls
Water Beings
where sea & sky share a name
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