05/20/2026
Announcing Cady Favazzo as our 2026 Peseroff Prize Poetry Contest Winner!
About her winning poem “Four Years Later, We Arrive at the Winter We Imagined”, Guest Judge Jill McDonough wrote: “I’m delighted to award the Peseroff Prize to Cady Favazzo, for their poignant and funny love poem, “Four Years Later, We Arrive at the Winter We Imagined.” Chock full of images of everyday beauty, “coming snow glowing in the opaque band of sunset behind our house,” this poem gives us “a universe that never tires//of loving back.” It’s a love poem “to this eternal thing between us,” celebrating even the moment the beloved was “born into this world for me to find.” There is so much charming wonder here, “filed between the work week and my eternal/begging to be touched,” a love poem not just to the beloved, but to love itself, and the way it colors our lives: when we are this happy, “the gas station glows/ through the gauzy curtains all night.”
Read it in Issue 40, dropping soon!
