2024 Previously Published Poem Prize: Winners & Finalists
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2024 Previously Published Poem Prize! Please join us in congratulating these brilliant poets. Deep gratitude to all who shared moving poems with us—we are so lucky to have been immersed in the worlds of your work. The winning poem and runner-ups were selected by Palette editors.
Winners of the 2024 Previously Published Poem Prize
1st place — Nicole Wan-Ting Lee for “Deluge: A Chinese Almanac” — first published in Gulf Coast
Nicole W. Lee was born in Sydney, Australia to Chinese Malaysian parents. Her poetry has been published in Agni, Crazyhorse (now swamp pink), Gulf Coast, Meanjin, and wildness, and has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House Summer and Winter Workshops, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, AWP, and Miami Book Fair. Currently she’s a poetry candidate in the low-residency MFA at Warren Wilson College and associate poetry editor at Four Way Review.
2nd place — Sa Whitley for “Prayer Circle” — first published in The Poetry Foundation
Sa Whitley is a black queer poet and postdoctoral scholar who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. They teach courses on feminist theory, financial subjectivity, and critical black urbanism in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Whitley currently holds poetry fellowships with Cave Canem, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley (2023-24). Their recent writing is published or forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Antipode, and Indiana Review. Whitley has also received literary fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2022) and the Community of Writers, and in addition, invitations for poetry fellowships from Tin House and Anaphora Arts. Recent honors include the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist honor for the 2023 Sewanee Review Poetry Contest. In their spare time, they go to queer dance parties, plan desert hikes, and watch sci-fi shows that imagine liberatory and postcolonial futures.
3rd place — Weijia Pan for “The Peasantry” — first published in Copper Nickel
Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Finalists
Rebecca Evans
Karina Guardiola-Lopez
Jane Herschlag
Milica Mijatovic
Ari Mokdad
Remi Recchia
Robert Schultz
Longlist
Eneida Alcalde
Rachel Baum
CooXooEii Black
Michael Boccardo
Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Sheila Carter-Jones
Jonathan Chan
Aliyah Cotton
Liza Katz Duncan
Debra Franco
Jason Gray
Graham Kelly
Dheepa Maturi
Hana Meron
Elizabeth Mitchell
TA Penny
Georgio Russell
Stephanie Saywell
Marqueshia Wilson
Megan Wray