NAPBA Winners and Finalists

2025 PSV NORTH AMERICAN POETRY BOOK AWARD Winner

The Poetry Society of Virginia is pleased to announce the Winner of the 2025 PSV North American Poetry Book Award Apocryphal Genesis by Travis Mossotti (Saturnalia Books)

Cover of Apocryphal Genesis by Travis Mossotti

Travis Mossotti, winner of the 2025 North American Poetry Book Award for his collection Apocryphal Genesis (Saturnalia Press), is the author of several award-winning works, including About the Dead, Field Study, Narcissus Americana, and Racecar Jesus. He has been the recipient of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and the May Swenson Book Award, among other commendations. He serves as a Biodiversity Fellow for the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University. He lives and works in St. Louis.

Purchase Apocryphal Genesis by Travis Mossotti

Thomas Gardner, Professor Emeritus, Virginia Tech, this year’s PSV North American Poetry Book Award final judge, praised Mossotti’s work as follows:

“Apocryphal Genesis is an act of witness, committed to peering through the mists of time and dailiness and bringing back into speech the invisible and forgotten. It’s a book “shin[ing] lights / on daily happenings of negligible / import,” convinced, and seeking to convince us, that this is where the sacred resides and where the cosmos holds its secrets. “Only invisible things are worth weeping for” it tells us, fighting to bring the world back into focus by uncovering old wounds and singing its way back into “the anger of the discarded” or “the rougher art” of our daily attempts to make meaning and perhaps, for a moment, if only a moment, “hang / an image upon the dining room wall / where before there was nothing, until now.” Its way is the way of meandering, as if what matters and what must be said can only be discovered in the saying, the poet’s deep faith in the everyday and ordinary supported by an equally deep faith in language’s ability to take us there. “We need not depart with an arrival in mind / as we sift our way through language,” Mossotti writes, sure that in time, in the writing, it will be morning again, “each step forward / [having] brought the world that much more into focus.” This is an exquisite, soaring book, catching thought on the fly, tasting it on the tongue before it “dissolves like sugar into batter” or standing back as it shatters in the air and reforms.”

First Finalist: In Another Country by Andrea Jurjević (Saturnalia Books)

Cover of In Another Country by Andrea Jurjević

Andrea Jurjević – Saturnalia Books

“These are poems, Jurjević writes, unfolding the space “between song and suffering [where] there is only nimble weather, bodies wet / with meaning.” And how powerfully the body speaks here, hungry, displaced, aroused, a palimpsest of tracings and visions and scars. If history’s unspeakable weight cannot be fully spoken, then, these poems insist, “what we keep unsaid we taste on our tongues,” in a language of the dark, “wet and light-absorbing,” making out of silence “a wild wasting,” a “gnawing for more,” “a stillsong” vividly present, winding its way through poem after poem.”

Second Finalist: Cauterized by Laura Apol (Michigan State University Press)

Book Details – Michigan State University
“Indeed, these poems are cauterized, “seared,” Laura Apol writes, by the death of a daughter, by “the grief / of a heart that once grew inside me, her / breaking.” Unsettled, self-lacerating—“Why didn’t she tell me?,” one poem asks; “Are you happy now? / See what you made me do?” laments another—these poems refuse consolation, refuse silence, refuse to be mended. And yet somehow, in that grief, out a language simultaneously wounded and tender, they teach us to make, with her, “a home for them,” for all of our losses.”

2025 Semifinalists

Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass (Perugia Press)
Inheritance with a High Error Rate by Jen Karetnick (Cider Press)
The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick (Madville Publishing)
Four Fields by Dorinda Wegener (Trio House Press)

2024 North American Poetry Book Award Winner

The Corrected Version by Rosanna Young Oh

“The spine of this remarkable debut collection is a series of poems about a speaker’s immigrant family and a childhood spent as the daughter of a Korean-born grocer who himself values reading and once wrote poems, but who now pours his lifeblood into keeping his store open 24/4 in the new world of America in which he has transplanted his family.

In poems by turn intergenerational, mythic, historical, personal, and ekphrastic, The Corrected Version offers the reader a revised look at an experience of immigrant life that is often misunderstood or oversimplified. In the opening poem, ‘Homework,’ a sonnet, a girl is praised by her teacher for writing with fresh detail about her home life and is encouraged to share her work with her classmates. When she does so, a boy’s cruel laugh ‘cuts me through,’ and the speaker wonders ‘Should I pretend my stories aren’t true?’ This book’s sensory, unflinching, gorgeously restrained poems offer the poet’s bold answer to this question.”

Lisa Russ Spaar, PSV North American Poetry Book Award final judge on The Corrected Version

2024 First Finalist

Cover of Siciliananas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Siciliananas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak (Bordighera Press)

“This inaugural collection is haunted by a host of twentieth-century Sicilian immigrants, mostly women, whose experiences, stories, and histories are given voice…In the title poem, the speaker says, ‘Today I’ve been in the mood for telling other people’s stories.’ And tell she does, in poems both evocative and mysterious. And yet the poems are not just about the globally dispersed lives of others; as she sings for those who often did not have a voice, she also comes to better know herself…” Lisa Russ Spaar, NAPBA Final Judge 2024

2024 Second Finalist

Dark Beds by Diana Whitney (June Road Press)

“Whitney’s rich, sensual, formally deft and often erotic poems of transgression and fidelity in realms domestic and beyond remind us that there is always a place in the Zeitgeist for the lyric poem of interiority and beauty. Whether delivering snacks to hungry first-graders and then rushing home to vacuum glow-in-the dark stars from the Berber carpet or swooning over ‘rapture without consequence,’ this is a speaker who turns again and again to the natural world for its lessons of indifference and transformation…” Lisa Russ Spaar, NAPBA Final Judge 2024

2024 Semifinalists

Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, Press 53
Below Zero by Carol V. Davis, Stephen F. Austin State University Press
The Long Journey Out by Ronald Okuaki Lieber, Resource Publications
The Disordered Alphabet by Cintia Santana, Four Way Books
The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den by Maya J. Sorini, Press 53
Local Congregation by Phillip Sterling, Main Street Rag Publishing Company
Heaven Underfoot by Diana Woodcock, Codhill Press

2023 North American Poetry Book Award Winner

Heartbreak Tree by Pauletta Hansel

Bill Glose, PSV North American Poetry Book Award final judge, praised Pauletta Hansel’s winning collection:

“Even before we open this book, the title warns what lies within will be bittersweet, its Heartbreak Tree rooted in ground seeded with regret and unfulfilled desires (When hurt is all that’s handed down / you learn to claim it). Yet, these poems also luxuriate in the comforts and personal connections that only home can offer, “the unseen river that silvers / through our dreams.”

The early poems serve as a captivating reminiscence that transports the reader to hardscrabble life in rural Kentucky (What people in town remember about my family’s home / was the dirt in the fenced front yard where no grass / could stay grown). But as the book progresses, the poems settle into middle-aged reckoning and acceptance, often told via letters the author writes to her 15-year-old self (If we are skin, you are peeled bark of sycamore long gone from / me. If we are bone, you are always mine).

Pauletta Hansel delivers a rust-edged nostalgia that portrays both a life of wistful yearnings and an acceptance of limitations, an ever-present dichotomy that leaves her examining most things from multiple angles (What moves us onward is the same, / sometimes, as what breaks us to the ground). The skill with which she traverses this seeming contradiction makes this captivating collection a must read.”

2023 First Finalist

Cover of The Mayapple Forest by Kim Ports Parson

The Mayapple Forest by Kim Ports Parson (Terrapin Books)

“Beautiful, evocative, mournful, Suzanne Edison’s poetry plumbs the depths of personal grief. In verse that often plays with form on the page, where much can be inferred from the white space between words, these poems stretch beyond their lines and entice readers to return for a second reading to glean deeper meanings.” Bill Glose, NAPBA Final Judge

2023 Second Finalist

Cover of Since the House is Burning by Suzanne Edison

Since the House is Burning by Suzanne Edison (MoonPath Press)

“These plain-spoken poems present a love song to life and all its daily miracles, often reveling in the splendor of the natural world. There are lamentations here, too, but the overall sense one gets from reading Kim Ports Parsons’ luminous collection is that the world is full of hope if only we open our minds to the possibility.” Bill Glose, NAPBA Final Judge