2024 Love & Eros Prize: Winners & Finalists
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2024 Love & Eros 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 guest judge John Lee Clark and are published on the Palette website.
Winners of the 2024 Love & Eros Prize
1st place — Kimberly Reyes for “claiming to know the tense in which love happens“
Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, 2nd generation NYer, and the author of the upcoming poetry collection Bloodletting (Omnidawn 2025), as well as the poetry collections vanishing point (Omnidawn 2023) and Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn 2019). Kimberly has received fellowships, scholarships, and prizes from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, and many other places. Her work has been published in various outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, American Poets Magazine, and The Stinging Fly.
2nd place — Desirée Alvarez for “Bedroom at the End of the World”
Desirée Alvarez is a poet and painter. Her second book, Raft of Flame, received the Lake Merritt Poetry Prize from Omnidawn. Devil’s Paintbrush received the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She has received awards and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Foundation for Contemporary Art, European Capital of Culture, Yaddo Art Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Poets House. Her poetry was awarded Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Poetry Award and she has published in journals including Boston Review, Fence Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Lit Hub, The Massachusetts Review, The Iowa Review, and The Slowdown Podcast. Her poetry is anthologized in Other Musics: New Latina Poets, Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice, and What Nature. She teaches at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, and The Juilliard School. Alvarez exhibits her paintings internationally. More at desireealvarez.com and @desireezoealvarez.
3rd place — Judith Sornberger for “After Making Love at 6AM, I Leave You in My Bed”
Judith Sornberger lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, PA. Her full-length poetry collections are: Open Heart (Calyx Books), Practicing the World (CavanKerry), I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock), and Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas. The most recent of her six chapbooks is The Book of Muses (Finishing Line Press). Her prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany is from Shanti Arts. She is a professor emerita of Mansfield University of Pennsylvania.
Finalists
Shrien Alshabasy
Valentina Gnup
Skye Jackson
Harriet Lamb
Carling McManus
K.R. Morrison
Ren Wilding
Longlist
Laura Booth
Laura Brady
Janet Burroway
Jasper Drummond
Joe Fletcher
Judith Fox
Richard Fox
Flo Glo
Chris Kingsley
Chris Klein
Lise Menn
B.D. Olivier
David Moolten
KeeShawn Murphy
Inna Rasitsan
Arthur Russell
Anne Sandor
Rodney Wilder
Imani Williams
Holly Zhou