2025 TWFest Poetry Contest Finalists
Congratulations to our 2025 Poetry Contest Winner, Runners-up, and Finalists!
Thanks to our poetry judge, Karisma Price, and our contest coordinator, Morgan Hufstader.
Pictured above from the top, left to right, our finalists are:
Sable Alysse is an up and coming artist hailing in from the [American] South. This young creative recently completed undergrad, earning a Bachelor’s degree in creative writing, psychology, and interdisciplinary studies. Though music is what birthed their passion for writing, poetry is what has nurtured it. More recently, their love for the art has grown to include playwriting. No matter the medium, Sable harmoniously blends lyricism and storytelling to bring her culture to the page and to the stage.
RUNNER UP: Alicia Badgett is a California born and raised writer who has been lucky to call New Orleans, Paris, and currently South Florida home. She is inspired by her Mexican–Italian–Irish Catholic upbringing, sensuality, and the body, drawing on her experience healing chronic illness and regaining vibrant health. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and French from Tulane University, where she specialized in Creative Writing.
Kurt David (he/him) and Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal (he/they) are queer bosom buddies based in New York and Philadelphia. Their collaborative work is published or forthcoming in Foglifter, New Delta Review, poetry.onl, and elsewhere. For more, visit kurt-david.com and isaiahbackgaal.com.
WINNER: Monic Ductan is the author of Daughters of Muscadine, a short story collection about black women in rural Georgia. Muscadine won both the Tennessee Book Award and the Weatherford Award for fiction. Monic lives in middle Tennessee and teaches at Tennessee Tech University. Her website is monicductan.com.
Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
Ava Tiye Kinsey is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and arts administrator from Dallas, Texas, who lives in New Jersey with her husband and son. She is the Associate Editor of Poetry for A Gathering Together Journal. Her work has been published in A Gathering Together Journal, Blackberry: A Magazine, Dutch Kills Press, and midnight & indigo (forthcoming). A portion of her master’s thesis was published in Judson Jeffries’ The Black Panther Party in a City Near You. Ava was named the runner-up for Prism International’s 2024 Grouse Grind Lit Prize for Short Forms for her short story “Memories of Freedom Whilst Suffocating in Cotton.”
Julie McNeely-Kirwan lives in Arkansas. Her poetry has appeared in The Bayou Blues and Red Clay Anthology, The Bacopa Literary Review, TheyCallUs, and The Wine Country Writer’s Festival Anthology. Her fiction has appeared in Every Writer’s Resource, Spine, Overtime, Every Day Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Sanitarium, Writer’s Digest’s Show Us Your Shorts, Flash Fiction Magazine and Five South.
Kache’ Attyana Mumford is a Black, neurodiverse poet from Jacksonville, FL. As a writer, therapist, and actor, she has dedicated her life to creating spaces where others feel empowered to share their stories. Through her poetry and work, she strives to uplift marginalized voices, bringing attention to the intersection of identity, mental health, and lived experience.
Laura Cottam Sajbel (she/hers) has been writing poems since fourth grade and coaxing others to write since grad school. After more than a decade of teaching writing at the university level, she has refocused on her own poetry, short stories, and nonfiction projects. Her work has been published in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Edible Austin, Ocotillo Review, and The Easy Reader, among other small presses. Recently transplanted from Austin, Texas, to Eugene, Oregon, Laura quilts, practices guitar and piano, swims, and is learning to cross-country ski and paddleboard in chilly but beautiful places.
RUNNER UP: sami h. tripp (they/m) is a hyphenate writing towards reconnection with ancestors past and present. Their poetry can be found in Bramble Lit Mag, Blue Heron Review, Saints and Sinners Festival 2023 Poetry Anthology, and Huizache. Privileged to be learning, creating, and communing with Yokuts land, they are constantly in awe of the ways science and magic braid our world together.
With a love for writing just as much as reading, Lillie Turman has surrounded her life with words. When she isn’t writing, you can find her drinking iced coffee, reading a book, or finishing a cross-stitch piece. She has an M.H. in Creative Writing and a B.S. in Film. She currently lives in Philadelphia, PA with her husband and two cats.
Gary Zebrun, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, has three published novels, Someone You Know (2004), Only The Lonely (2008) and Hart Island (April, 2024). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Iowa Review, American Scholar, Sewanee, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Poetry Now, The Massachusetts Review and other places. He’s published prose and fiction in The New York Times, The Believer and The Common and other newspapers and journals. He has received Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships and has been a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
