2024-2025 PJI Prizes Winners!
We are happy to announce the winners of the 2024-2025 PJI Prize and PJI Editor’s Prize!
PJI Prize - T. S. Leonard
T.S. Leonard is a poet, performer, and author whose work explores queerness, loss, and community at the intersection of music and time travel. Leonard’s work has been featured in Poetry and in collaborative projects including Spectral Transmissions (Portland Art Museum) and Wrapture (Pacific Design Center). Leonard holds an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.
Our finalists for the PJI Prize (in no ranked order) are the following:
Christine Robbins - Cassandra and the Ghost Bees
Peter Kline - Protagonist
Ruth Willliams - Unmother
Brandon Rushton - The Search Properties
Samodh Porawagamage - To Punani Camp
Sara Femenella - Elegies for One Small Future
Paul Shepherd - Reasons Like Birds
Christopher Nelson - Black Shoal
Johanna Magin - Against Reason
Diana Keren Lee - How to Cast a Beautiful Animal
PJI Editor’s Prize - Diana Keren Lee
Diana Keren Lee is the winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A National Poetry Series finalist, her work has appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Pleiades, Wildness, and elsewhere. She received degrees from The University of Texas at Austin and New York University and awards from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
Our finalists for the Editors Prize (in no ranked order) are the following:
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes - against the indistinct grey of the world
Robert René Galván - Vaqueros and other Poems
Michael Chang - Lucky Strike
Krystal Vazquez - carne, 1970
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé - My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body
Rukhsar Palla - Muslimah Wandering
Samson Allal - Age to Age
Winshen Liu - Moonful
Nancy Woo - Field Notes from a Slow Apocalypse
Malik Rasaq - The Origin of Wounds
Steve Castro - Conejo y Gallo
Elvis Alves - Paradise
Lawrence Matsuda - WWII Minidoka, Idaho Concentration Camp-Dark and Light
Fernando Torres - Only alive can one die
Javier Sarmiento Jr. - The Harlem Experience
Beth Brown Preston - OXYGEN II
Both texts will be published by Fordham University Press in Fall 2026!
