We are pleased to announce the winners of the Third Annual 1455 Teen Poetry Contest. The theme for this year’s contest is Finding Community During Crisis, and the guidelines requested the poems to reflect on or react to the contemporary sociopolitical and cultural environment (including but not limited to #BLM, #MeToo, COVID, etc.)
First, some numbers. We were delighted to double the number of submissions from 2020 and we read over 130 poems from around the country, including a handful from overseas. Consistent with the previous contests, the overall quality of the writing exceeded all expectations. On one hand, this made for some difficult decisions; on the other hand, based on this sample of young writers, the future of poetry will be diverse, passionate, and brilliant.
The judges (1455 Founder and Executive Director Sean Murphy, and co-judge Maia Siegel) admired the range of voices and quality of expression, but—like last year!—some excruciating choices had to be made. As such, it was with no small relief that we had consensus regarding the ultimate finalists.
(Note: all the poems were read blind. Per the contest guidelines, no author information was to appear on any of the poems, and the personal biographies of each were sent as separate attachments.)
Grand Prize Winner
Yvanna Vien Tica
Our grand prize winner is Yvanna Vien Tica, whose poem “At A Wake, I Confront” was the unanimous choice for this award. Yvanna is a Filipina writer who grew up in Manila and in a suburb near Chicago. She has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, The Kenyon Review, The Young Playwrights Festival, Princeton University’s Creative Writing Department, The Poetry Society UK, Aster Lit, and The Hippocrates Young Poets Prize. Her poetry is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, DIALOGIST, Hobart, and Shenandoah, among others. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Faith Review, an Executive Editor for Polyphony Lit, a Poetry Editor for The Global Youth Review, and a Poetry Reader for Muzzle Magazine. Her poem appears below; a full recap of the winners (and their poems) will appear in a subsequent post.
The second prize winner is Yejin Suh for her poem “Elegy for Our Pseudohistories” by Yejin Suh. The third prize winner is Stella Lei for her poem “Letter for Ellie Chu.” Honorable mentions are awarded to Sabrina Guo (“Elegy with Lipstick Smear”), Matt Hsu (“Fissureman”), Chloe Lin (“golden bowl hunger”), Sophia Mateja (“Fuego”), Emily Truman (“It Takes a Village”), Amy Wang (“Swallow-Boned”), and Richard Zhu (“crabs caught in chain-link”). All finalists will be invited to read from their work during a special ceremony this Friday at 7pm EST during 1455’s 3rd Annual Summer Literary Festival.
REGISTER NOW at 1455litarts.org/summerfest
“At a Wake, I Confront”
by Yvanna Vien Tica, Grand Prize Winner of 1455’s Teen Poet Contest
a boy who stares at me. The window parallels
our distance. Unthreatened, I ask him if he has trouble
sleeping and what pills he takes to bed. Whether
his dreams bleed
into night terrors.
I tell him about my nightmares
mimicking the shudder of an old man’s
body after a beating. My K-complexes refuse to let me
believe this is all imaginary,
that a nation rejecting its blood is innocent
of its sickness. I almost tell him I’ve hunted
the mountains for respite. The roads etched
into their sides like scars.
Instead I tell the boy I avoid
going outside. I tell him
about an old Vietnamese-American man
whose store I’d pass on the way to school.
I haven’t seen him, I say. All the blinds are drawn.
I tell him I fear breathing
without a mask. The stench of blood
overwhelms me. I tell him isn’t it
interesting how faces are cartography
that can haunt mountains
like wandering men. I tell him I lied
about the old man. I did see him
by the side of his store lying
unconscious. His head looked like the tomatoes
my mother liked to buy
from his store to stew in her sour soups.
As if tomatoes could enact
violent stages of grief. I tell him that,
lying there, the old man
reminded me of my grandfather
taking a nap, his head bowed in a listing prayer.
I almost apologize for politicizing every story
to keep this nation awake. Instead
I tell him how the old man once said he missed wandering
the mountains with good knees. He knew flowers
like a language and once gave me a hand-picked chrysanthemum
for a long and beautiful life. He told me
he had a grandson my age and hoped
we’d be friends when he visited.
As our reflections touch in the window, I tell the boy
the old man missed his grandson
more than the mountains and good knees.
That he would have given him more
chrysanthemums than he could hold
in his hands, in his vases.
