Grand Prize Winner 2025

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Shannan is the Founding Editor of ONLY POEMS. She has been awarded or placed for the Palette Love & Eros Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Auburn Witness Prize, Foster Poetry Prize, among others. Her poems appear in Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Gulf Coast, The Literary Review of Canada, EPOCH, december, & elsewhere. Her essays appear in Tolka Journal and Going Down Swinging; they have been awarded the Alta Lind Cook Prize and the Irene Adler Essay Prize. She also translates Sanskrit poetry.

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Honorable Mentions

Poet Name Poet Name Poet Name Poet Name Poet Name

Grand Prize Winner 2024

Natasha Oladokun

"Benedetta Carlini at Deviance, Crucible"

‍

Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. They hold fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Oladokun’s work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. She is writing her first poetry collection.

Read

Finalist

Jaia Hamid Bashir

"Good Girl"

‍

Jaia Hamid Bashir is a South Asian-American artist. Her work has been featured in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, The Arkansas International, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and Virginia Quarterly Review. A graduate of Columbia University, she now lives and writes in the American West with her partner. Her chapbook "Desire/Halves" is set to be published in Fall 2024.

Read

Finalist

Imogen Osborne

"Rewards"

‍

Imogen Osborne is a writer based in Ithaca, NY. She is a recent MFA graduate of Cornell’s creative writing program and currently teaches creative writing to college students and incarcerated adults. You can find poems, stories and essays on her website.

‍

Read

Finalist

Margaret Wack

"The Invention of Arithmetic"

‍

Margaret Wack is the author of the chapbook The Body Problem, winner of the 2021 Orison Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in EcoTheo Review, Passages North, Grist, Strange Horizons, Arion, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at North Carolina State University.

‍

Read

Finalist

Savannah Massey

"sappho when raised southern baptist"

‍

Savannah Massey is a student at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. There, she is Editor-in-Chief of the student literary magazine. She is a 2025 YoungArts winner with Distinction in Poetry. Her work is published across over 20 international institutions.

‍

Read

Honorable Mentions

Cat Wei, “The Last Touch”Christopher Allen, “Filled”Sam Bovard, “Men who have sex with men” Isha Camara, “Poem written after I ate the sun”m. mick powell, “I know enough about moderation”Jeremy Radin, “The Song of Songs of Songs of Songs”Corey Zeller, “One Hand Flat Against the Trapdoor, the Other Hand Knocking”

Grand Prize Winner 2023

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Finalist

Poet Name

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

Read

Honorable Mentions

Poet Name Poet Name Poet Name Poet Name Poet Name

More Prize Winners

MEMBERSHIP PORTAL | FAQ | SUBMIT

2025 ONLY INK, Inc. All rights reserved.
ONLY POEMS®️ and associated marks are trademarks of ONLY INK, Inc. All individual works are copyrighted by their respective authors. All poems, essays, and artworks published on this site remain the intellectual property of their creators and may not be reproduced without explicit permission. The views expressed in published works are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ONLY INK, Inc., its editors, or affiliated entities. While many works draw on lived experience, they may contain fictionalized elements; no reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred. ONLY POEMS is an ad-free, independent, reader-supported publication.