2025 Pinch Literary Award in Poetry
We’re thrilled to announce the results of the 2025 Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, judged by Raye Hendrix
The winner of the contest is the poem Fleeing (After Helene) by McKenzie Teter. A Midwestern poet currently living in Asheville, North Carolina, Teter received her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. More of her work can be found in The Shore, HAD, or via her website.
Of the winner, Hendrix notes: “Appalachia, especially Southern Appalachia, is an often overlooked, misunderstood, mischaracterized, and even demonized region. In the devastating wake of Hurricane Helene, so much of this country was all too willing—maybe even eager—to decide this is what Appalachia deserved. This poem wrestles with that devastation deftly, painstakingly—and with the sharp understanding that language cannot save anyone from climate change: "What supplies does language bring? ... "Unlike hope, words like dire do not float." This is a poem that brilliantly uses language to comment on the ways language fails, and this piece is all the more powerful for that "failure." Like Appalachia, devastated beyond words but resilient and determined to the end, this poem "plant[s] its feet and howl[s]." This is a stunning, devastating important work of witness.”
The poems selected as finalists include Sahuayo Butchery and Slaughterhouse by Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador. Born and raised in México, Amador is a poet, editor, interpreter-translator, and MFA student. She is the nonfiction editor for Grist Journal and a poetry reader for Only Poems. Hendrix also selected Nothing as Neutral by Carlina Duan. The author of the poetry collections I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017), and Alien Miss (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2021), Duan is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches poetry.
As always, Pinch is thankful to the Hohenberg Foundation, which makes our literary contests possible and supports the efforts of the journal.
Raye Hendrix is a writer, disability scholar, and photographer from Alabama. Raye’s debut full-length collection of poetry, What Good Is Heaven, was published in September 2024 by Texas Review Press as the Alabama selection for their Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series. What Good Is Heaven is the winner of the 2024 Weatherford Award for Best Appalachian Poetry.
Raye is also the author of the chapbooks Every Journal is a Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press) and Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press). She is the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and the Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review, 2018), and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Poetry Daily, American Poetry Review, The Seventh Wave, Poet Lore, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere.
Raye earned their PhD from the University of Oregon, where they were awarded grants and fellowships for their work at the intersections of American Literature and Disability Studies. Raye also earned their BA and MA from Auburn University and their MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, where they won the Michael Adams Thesis Prize in Poetry (selected by Robyn Schiff).
Raye is the editor of Dis/Connect: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press) and Origin Story: A Poetry Interview Project, as well as a member of the Thunder and Lightning Poetry Collective, a platform dedicated to highlighting BIPOC and/or queer disabled poets. Raye is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
