!!!!Announcing the 2025 O’Hara Prize Results!!!!
1st Place: Anthony DiPietro with “The God of Hide and Seek“
2nd Place: Maia Campbell with “When I Grow Up“
3rd Place: Claire Schaeffer Duffy with “Homage to the Enemy’s Poet“
Honorable Mention: Elina Kumra with “ontology of water memory“
Honorable Mention: Em Judkins with “Crying About Old Women at the Macy’s Jewelry Counter (Again)“
A HUGE thank you to all of our wonderful participants! We got so many contributions and read some truly fantastic poems.
A big thank you to our judge DeMisty Bellinger for her thoughtful consideration!
and a heartfelt Congratulations to our 2025 O’Hara Prize Winners!
We hope to see everyone at the O’Hara reading in September.
Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet originally from Providence, RI, who has lived throughout New England and elsehwere. Now deputy director of Rose Art Museum, he resides in Worcester, MA. He composed his 2021 chapbook And Walk Through (Seven Kitchens Press) on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns, and his debut collection is kiss & release (Unsolicited Press, 2024).
Maia Campbell is a Jamaican-American writer and doctoral candidate studying political philosophy at the University of Dallas. Maia has published poetry in Amistad: Howard University’s Literary Arts Journal and Wilder Roam. She has also participated in several poetry readings and has had her work publicly displayed as part of the Worcester County Poetry Association’s Rain Poetry Competition in 2022 and 2024. Maia grew up in Worcester and moved back to the city in 2023.
Claire Schaeffer Duffy’s work as a freelance journalist began in 1999. Her book reviews, essays, profiles, features and investigative stories have appeared in America, Commonweal, US Catholic, and the National Catholic Reporter and garnered a number of awards from the Catholic Press Association. An essay on hospitality appears in the final chapter of the two-volume work, Nonviolence as Way of Life. Claire regularly contributes to The Catholic Radical, a publication of the Saints Francis and Therese Catholic Worker in Worcester, MA Mother of four and grandmother of six, she comes to poetry late in life.
Elina Kumra is a poet and writer, author of Ash and Olive and Extant. She writes of memory, loss, and resilience in life’s quiet ruptures. Her words are spare and sure, each one carrying its quiet weight. Her poems and stories have appeared in magazines at home and abroad, and her work has earned recognition from literary organizations. She teaches poetry and believes words can heal and bear witness.
Em Judkins (they/them) is an over-caffeinated queer poet and filmmaker based in Massachusetts. They graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in English and Film and Media Studies. Their work has received Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, the Ruth Forbes Eliot Prize, and Elizabeth Drew Essay Prize, and appears in The Core Review, new words poetry journal, Emulate, and elsewhere. They believe in love and bad art.