09/17/2025
🏅We are pleased to announce that Mark Kyungsoo Bias has won the 2025 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize for his manuscript MINOR DESTRUCTIONS, an emotionally charged and lyrically bracing response to loss and its continuing presence.
Prize Citation by judge Eric Gamalinda:
"This is poetry as heightened sense of awareness—of the smallness of our existence in time, yet also painfully aware that we can only live within that brief moment: and here lies this collection’s magic and its triumph. It is that sense of being fully alive, poetry that makes you feel alive, that makes language feel alive. The poems somehow embrace you, welcoming you into a private world full of absence and longing, but also hope and the constant presence of those who had lived this life before us.
"This collection is haunting in its sorrow and splendor, the poems the result of a keen awareness of mortality and the joy and peace that ultimately come from it. Here is language that is alive because it continues to surprise us who utter it, alive because we are full of suffering and love, and here is poetry that reminds us that we are not the only ones broken, not the only ones about to be healed: we seek meaning and beauty in how we define ourselves in love, family, country, the world. Indeed, these poems point us past all our sorrow and towards that elusive beauty, and it is there if we want it. These poems have duende, and are nothing short of transcendent."
The Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize is awarded annually to an unpublished manuscript of original Anglophone poetry by an author of Asian heritage residing anywhere in the world. The winner receives book publication and a prize purse of USD1,500.00. The 2025 prize was judged by Eric Gamalinda.
