News

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that final judge Marilyn Chin has chosen Kate Sweeney’s “Self Portrait” as the winner of the 2024 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry.

Kate Sweeney holds an MFA from Bennington College and serves as Managing Editor for Pleiades Magazine. Kate’s poems and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming from Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest & elsewhere. She is author of the chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us (Ethel 2021”). Kate lives just north of New York City.

Of Sweeney’s poem, Marilyn Chin writes, "I love this tiara of sonnets, filled with lurid confessions and womanist high jinks. I am especially impressed by the sprinklings of brilliant assertions: 'Gender is undistinguishable from gender…' 'You were immune, an error of blood at birth, small and pale, and boned.' Perhaps this sequence was inspired by Adrienne Rich’s 'Twenty-One Love Poems,' perhaps not. Nonetheless, I believe that Adrienne Rich would’ve enjoyed reading this edgy collection.”

Along with naming the winner, Chin selected three finalists, Jennifer Martelli for “1979,” No’u Revilla for “Keep Asking Aunties,” and Sydney Mayes for “Portrait of a Negress.”

The editors also selected as semi-finalists Summer Awad’s "love in the time of clovis,” Sarah Matsui’s "Kumquat Taxonomy," Dujie Tahat’s "All-American Ghazal,”  Zuleyha Lasky’s "El-Jadida, Morocco,” Laetitia Keok’s "Intimacy Study,” Jordan Hill’s "Strips of Scar Tissue,” and Zach Linge’s "Poem Ending with a Line by Britney"

The winning poem will appear in an upcoming issue of the BPJ.

We’re grateful to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and to all who submitted poems for this year’s contest.