The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award - 2025

Jenny George on Sasha Roque Pimentel

Like a perfect miniature ship in a bottle, this poem gives us an entire world inside a tiny, luminous container. Sweep of history, objects reverberating with specificity, textures of intimate relationship—all concentrated into the best kind of short poem, one that keeps unfolding with depth and meaning the longer you stay with it. I love this poem’s command of scale—the play of the long title with the short lyric, the span of time in the compressed first gesture: “Some of us lived.” The intricate joints of the line and stanza breaks keep us riveted as the poem emerges. Then the poet leaves us in a space echoing with the unsaid, inviting us to feel how silence has shaped the whole scope of the poem’s making. A delicate and powerful work of art.

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Born in the Philippines and raised in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Sasha Roque Pimentel is the author of For Want of Water, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Insides She Swallowed, winner of the American Book Award. Her poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, PBS News Hour, American Poetry Review, POETRY and LitHub, among others. She has been a Picador Guest Professor, an NEA fellow, and is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she teaches in its bilingual (Spanish-English) MFA in Creative Writing program, on the border of Ciudad Juárez, México.

Finalist

Wayne Miller's most recent poetry collection is The End of Childhood (Milkweed, 2025). His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Poetry Foundation, the Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards; a Pushcart Prize, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to Northern Ireland. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, and edits Copper Nickel.