2026 TWFest Poetry Finalists

Congratulations to our 2026 Poetry Winner, Runners-Up, and Finalists!

Thanks to our Poetry judge, Skye Jackson, and our contest coordinator, Johanna Ziegler.

Pictured above from the top, left to right, our finalists are:

Leona Verrelle has an MFA in poetry from the University of Miami, where she received a James A. Michener fellowship and served as the poetry editor for Mangrove. She also has a B.A. from the University of Michigan, with a double major in music and psychology. For nineteen years, she taught high school English in the Bronx, NY. Her poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals, including Cold Mountain Review; Seattle Review; Northwest Review; The Spoon River Poetry Review; and Coal City Review, where she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Currently, she is at work on a memoir and novel, as well as two poetry manuscripts.

Aris Kian (she/her) is a Houston enthusiast and student of abolition. Her poems are published with Button Poetry, West Branch, Obsidian Lit, and elsewhere. As an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of Houston. Her team Smoke Slam ranked #1 at the 2025 Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam. She previously served as the 2023-2025 Houston Poet Laureate and was chosen as a 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.

Michelle Stoll is a Southern writer, who spent most of her adult life in Virginia. She has returned to her hometown of North Little Rock, Arkansas, where she enjoys the company of many dear friends and a few family members. She holds an MFA from Mississippi University for Women. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as West Trade Review, Pine Hills Review, River Heron Review, Rock Paper Poem, Crosswinds, Galway Review, SLANT, and others. She was a finalist for the River Heron Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Wigtown Poetry Prize. She was a reader for Poetry South, and is currently on the editorial team of SLANT. Michelle is a Master Naturalist, a world traveler, and supports most well-intentioned shenanigans.

WINNER: Tianyu Yi was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and graduated from Davidson College. She graduated in 2023 from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing Program, where she was the Wiley K. Birkhofer Fellow. Her work can be found in The Missouri Review, The Mississippi Review, and The Vassar Review. She is now studying Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine in Brooklyn, NY.

Brittney P. Mihalich is an Alabama-born and Kansas-raised educator, writer, and editor. She is an MFA candidate at Fairfield University, and her work has been featured in Minerva Rising, Glacial Hills Review, and The Northeast Coast. She resides in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley with her husband and their two sons.

RUNNER-UP: Javier Fernandez is a fiction writer and poet from Los Angeles now living in New Orleans. For the last ten years, he has lived without a smartphone.

A.B. “Quinn” Quinn (she/they) abides in New Orleans, where she writes and performs poems, stories, and ukulele songs. Threads of loss, addiction, recovery, and spiritual growth weave through her work, which she hopes will be of benefit to all beings. The greatest miracle of her neurodivergent life was earning a B. A. in Sociology from the University of New Orleans. She wrote a short work of science fiction concerning grief and time travel for The London Reader.

Casey Gabriella Ramos is an artist, poet, and video game narrative designer from Jamaica, Queens, New York. Raised in a Brazilian and Filipino household of thirteen, Casey’s work as an artist often materializes with identity and community at the forefront. Casey previously worked at Xbox Game Studios Publishing as a Narrative Director, and at Gameheads Oakland as a mentor and instructor, a tech mentorship for low-income youth of color in the Bay Area. Currently unemployed, Casey is pursuing art full-time while living in Montreal, Quebec.

Terry Repak, after working as a journalist for a few years, moved to Côte d’Ivoire with her husband, where he directed HIV/AIDS projects and she wrote and raised their children. They lived in east and west Africa and Europe for 15 years before settling in Seattle. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications and her most recent book is a memoir, Circling Home: What I Learned By Living Elsewhere (She Writes Press 2023). She is also the author of Waiting on Washington: Central America Workers in the Nation’s Capital (with Temple University Press, 1995), and Edward Kennedy (Houghton Mifflin 1980). She has an author website at www.terryrepak.com and a Substack at https://terryrepak.substack.com.

RUNNER-UP: Wendy A. Gaudin is a writer, a history professor, and a vernacular beadworker whose interdisciplinary work centers mixed-heritage and mixed-race populations and histories. Gaudin writes across genres, including creative nonfiction, autoethnography, oral history, narrative poetry, and personal narrative. Her writing delves into the themes of race and hybridity, skin color and ancestry, family, migration, and memory. Gaudin’s mixed-genre monograph, Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole (LSU Press 2025) follows her family’s trajectory from New Orleans to Los Angeles, and her own return to. Her shorter works have been published in Indiana Review, Rappahannock Review, About Place Journal, The Healing Muse, and New South Journal. She teaches at Xavier University of Louisiana.