Anna Rabinowitz Award | 2026

Diana Khoi Nguyen on Stella Wong

“Dramatic Monologues (After Women in Sound)” leaves me brimming with speechlessness: I am agape and astounded by multiple feats of brilliance: concrete persona poems each comprising either the shape or outline of that female gender symbol seen on restroom doors (silhouette of a body in a dress). Here, Wong channels radical, pioneering female artists: Laurie Anderson, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Éliane Radigue, Elsa Marie Pade, and Laetitia Sonami. But the concrete poems aren’t the beginning or the end, rather, they are one node in this virtuosic constellation of representation, signal, and feedback. The poet is also a digital signal processor: forms (visual and aural) tumble, recycle, restart, and “respawn” on the page, and on the tape. The javascript code in this constellation begins (coincidentally) like the book of Genesis: “let poem; / let woman; / let outputLines = [ ] ;” Wong’s poetics is multivalent: visual, computational, and ultimately, one of acute listening. In “Dramatic Monologue as Laurie Anderson,” Wong writes, “None of t / he analo gy want / s to wor k today / .” This magnum opus cannot be analogized—there simply is nothing else like it. Pay attention to its “dreams of power.”

About the Winner

Stella Wong is the author of Stem (selected for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) and Spooks (winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize). A graduate of Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Columbia, Wong’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The New Republic. She is an Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student focusing on acoustics and music.