View contest results and information here.

We are very pleased to announce the winners of our fifth annual ProForma Contest!

• First Place: Samuel Piccone’s “Epithalamium Domestica” and other poems
• Co-Runners Up:  Amy Parkes’ “THREE GHOSTS” series and Laura Villareal’s “Solar Eclipse // Myself In Orbit” and other poems

See below for more about our winners and for what judge Lo Kwa Mei-en had to say about our winner:

First Place and winner of $1200: Samuel Piccone’s “Epithalamium Domestica”

Samuel Piccone is the author of the chapbook Pupa (Anhinga Press, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Southern Indiana Review, Passages North, Greensboro Review, and The Pinch. He received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review. Currently, he resides and teaches in Nevada.

Judge Lo Kwa Mei-en had this to say about Samuel Piccone’s set of poems “Epithalamium Domestica”: “In these poems, the chosen formal conceits are as crucial and as subtle as oxygen. The varied formal works present the subject of marriage–the breathing thematic thread of this collection–as inseparable from its own formal traditions, inherited expectations, and procedural paradoxes of creativity and constraint. I admire the poet’s dedication to both sensual crafting of language and philosophical inquiry. I admire how they wrote both with and into the form of each poem, and how each poem therefore sings of both poetic agency and human surrender. ”

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Runner-Up: Amy Parkes’ “THREE GHOSTS”

Amy Parkes is a queer Nova Scotia poet who holds an English BAH from Acadia University and a poetry MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in Estuary, Cauldron Anthology, and Barrelhouse Literary Magazine among others, and her first piece of creative nonfiction is in the current issue of Studies in Canadian Literature. Parkes has poetry forthcoming with the Bacopa Literary Review and the University of Prince Edward Island. She writes poetry book reviews freelance, and is currently a finalist for the North Carolina Literary Review‘s James Applewhite Poetry Prize.

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Runner-Up: Laura Villareal’s set of poems “Solar Eclipse // Myself In Orbit”

Laura Villareal earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. She is a recipient of the 2018 Key West Literary Seminar Teacher and Librarian Scholarship, The Highlights Foundation’s 2018 Laurie Halse Anderson Scholarship, and Poetry at Round Top’s 2019 Norma Pascusz Fellowship. Her first chapbook The Cartography of Sleep came out in 2018 with Nostrovia! Press. Her writing can be found in Black Warrior Review, Vinyl, Waxwing, and elsewhere

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Congratulations also to this year’s finalists and semi-finalists!

Finalists:

Rebecca J Bedell
Sydney Jin Choi 
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach 
Chloe Firetto-Toomey 
Cameron McGill 
Emilie Menzel
Daniel Uncapher

Semi-Finalists:

Joe Aguirre
Mark Bauer
Jennifer Jackson Berry
May-lee Chai
Kirsten Shu-ying Chen 
Elleanor Chin 
James A. Jordan
Anatoly Molotkov
Honor Vincent

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The three winners will be published in Grist’s Issue Thirteenth in Spring 2020. To pre-order Issue Thirteen, head over to our Submittable page.