2025 TENNESSEE COLLEGIATE
POETRY CONTEST
Thank you to all who entered our 2025 contest, and congratulations to the winners! Many thanks also to judge Jane Hicks.
FIRST: “Autumn’s Decline,” by Abigail Webb (East Tennessee State University)
SECOND: “Call me when you get there,” by Skye Kletz, Middle Tennessee State University
THIRD: “Honey Singed, Nostalgia Tinged,” by Emiliya Mailyan, Middle Tennessee State University
HONORABLE MENTIONS
“Hands,” by Katen Wall, Tennessee Wesleyan
“Television America,” by Cooper Henson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
SECOND: “Call me when you get there,” by Skye Kletz, Middle Tennessee State University
THIRD: “Honey Singed, Nostalgia Tinged,” by Emiliya Mailyan, Middle Tennessee State University
HONORABLE MENTIONS
“Hands,” by Katen Wall, Tennessee Wesleyan
“Television America,” by Cooper Henson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
ABOUT OUR 2025 CONTEST WINNERS
Abigail Webb is a junior at East Tennessee State University, where she studies English and journalism. After completing her degree, she would like to work towards becoming an editor. She loves reading nature poems and gothic literature.
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Skye Kletz is a Tennessee-based author focused on exploring the visceral brutality and haunting discordance of living through evocative poetry and prose. Kletz aims to capture readers with feelings of equal intrigue, dread, and unabashed desire to confront the incongruencies of the world mirrored and molded in Kletz's work.
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Emiliya Mailyan is an English Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant at Middle Tennessee State University. She received her M.A. from Belmont University, where she wrote a multigenre work of poems and vignettes about her family’s Armenian heritage and refugee experience. Her areas of scholarly interest include rhetoric and composition, diaspora studies, food culture, documentary poetics, and multigenre creative writing.
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ABOUT THE JUDGE (2025)
A native of upper East Tennessee, Jane Hicks is an award-winning poet and quilter. The Jesse Stuart Foundation published her first book, Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia in 2005. The book met with popular and critical acclaim, winning the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year prize. It was also nominated for the Weatherford Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association. Jane’s poetry has frequently appeared in journals and literary magazines in the southeast, notably Wind, Now & Then, Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Asheville Poetry Review, and Shenandoah. Her poems have been anthologized in Migrants and Stowaways and Literary Lunch published by the Knoxville Writers Guild, Crossing Troublesome 25 years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop, Coal: A Poetry Anthology, We All Live Downstream: Writings About Mountaintop Removal, Southern Poetry Anthology: Contemporary Appalachia, Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, and Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia. Her work appeared in an anthology of poetry with connections to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her “literary quilts” illustrate the works of playwright Jo Carson and novelists Sharyn McCrumb and Silas House. The art quilts have toured with these respective authors and were the subject of a feature in Blue Ridge Country Magazine in an issue devoted to arts in the region. Jane retired from Sullivan County, Tennessee schools after thirty years of teaching. Her second poetry book, published in the fall of 2014 by the University Press of Kentucky, is titled Driving with the Dead. It also won the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year (2015) and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award. Her critically acclaimed third book, The Safety of Small Things, was published by the University of Kentucky Press under Hindman's Fireside Press imprint in early 2024. This book met with wide critical acclaim and was nominated for a number of awards yet to be determined. |
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