Our Finalists
Gwynn Haas is seventeen and attends Red Mountain High School. She was featured in the Shermer Art Show for her photography work and was one of the top solo scorers in a poetry slam put on by LTAB. Gwynn has been sort of the poetry club at her school going on three years. She also has traveled to Europe and volunteered at a music camp for high schoolers in Latvia. Gwynn enjoys writing, deep philosophical conversations, and a good cup of coffee.
Poulami Soni is a 17 year old freshman at University of Arizona's Honors College. She's majoring in neursocience and cognitive science as well as public health and plans to minor in creative writing. Poulami is an active participant in various civic engagement and climate justice organizations. She also likes turtles.
Poulami Soni is a 17 year old freshman at University of Arizona's Honors College. She's majoring in neursocience and cognitive science as well as public health and plans to minor in creative writing. Poulami is an active participant in various civic engagement and climate justice organizations. She also likes turtles.
Our Judges
Megan Atencia graduated from ASU in May of 2017 with degrees in Global Health, English Literature, and Spanish. During and directly after college, she worked in nonprofit global health fields and quickly learned that draining your soul is probably not the best way to change the world. Instead, you have to change people -- and while poetry can't change the world, poetry can change people... and people change the world. Megan now works as a teaching artist, teaching English Literature full time at an alternative high school in South Phoenix and cultivating local arts spaces. She is a board member of ReFrame Youth Arts Center and an aspiring bookshop granny. She has been published most recently in little somethings press, though most of her work maintains the oral traditions and spoken word, and thus can be heard at open mics and features around the Valley, most recently at the Queer Poetry Salon at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore. Megan hopes to release her first collection "The Wrong Side of the Pacific" as soon as she stops adopting new animals.
Sean Avery (they/them) is a culture worker, organizer, and Hip-Hop head based in Arizona. Their work integrates rap, poetry, and theater to explore how Black masculinity is projected onto their body. They strive for an authentic performance of self, in hopes that they’ll inspire others to examine their own identities.
Avery has shared stages with Saul Williams, J. Ivy, and Lemon Anderson. Their work’s been featured in Afropunk, Blavity, the Chicago Hip-Hop Theater Festival, and the Tucson Poetry Festival. Currently, Avery teaches throughout the Valley. Their album and play skinnyblk, and all of their work, can be found at superseanavery.com.
Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ and the founding editor of both rinky dink press (a publisher of micro-collections of micro-poetry) and The Revolution (Relaunch), a creative resurgence of the official newspaper of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. She’s the recipient of five Pushcart nominations, an Arts Hero Award, a Women & Philanthropy grant, and a fellowship from the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. She’s published three collections of poetry, including The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. She teaches courses on women’s literature, medical poetry, and journal curation/editing at Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix campus. www.rdpoet.com
Austin Davis is a poet and student activist studying creative writing at ASU. Austin is the author of "The World Isn't the Size of Our Neighborhood Anymore" (Weasel Press) and "Celestial Night Light" (Ghost City Press). Austin likes drinking hot cups of Irish Breakfast tea, taking long walks at night when the world is still and quiet, and spending time with the people he loves. You can find Austin on Twitter @Austin_Davis17 and on Instagram @austinwdavis1.
Hunter Hazelton is a poet and educator from Phoenix, Arizona. He earned a BSED in English Secondary Education from Northern Arizona University. He also completed his certificate in creative writing while studying at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Hazelton has been published by Best New Poets, Scribendi, and Storm of Blue Press, among others, and he currently co-coordinates Poetry on Roosevelt Row while teaching 9th grade English. However, he is proudest of the fact that he is still here and wants to share these moments with those around him.
M. McDonough is a poet, originally from Denver, reseeded in Phoenix. Since beginning their journey in spoken word in high school, they have taken the stage in local, national, and international poetry slam competitions. While performing and writing they also cultivated a deep interest and love of community. They worked for 7 years as a poetry mentor and outreach coordinator for Denver Minor Disturbance youth poetry slam. In this role they facilitated workshops, wrote curriculum, coached performance, and supported the growth of young artists.
Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award. She was previously featured on PBS NewsHour as “one of three women poets to watch” and she was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.
Laura Tohe is Sleepy-Rock People clan and born for the Bitter Water People clan. She grew up at the base of the Chuska Mountains in Crystal, New Mexico and currently lives in Phoenix, AZ. She is the author of Making Friends with Water; No Parole Today (named Poetry Book of the Year by the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers); co-editor of Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community; Tseyí Deep in the Rock (received the Arizona Book Association’s Glyph Award for Best Poetry and Best Book); and Code Talker Stories. The Phoenix Symphony commissioned her to write the libretto for Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio, which made its 2008 world premiere as part of the Phoenix Symphony’s 60th anniversary. A compact disc recording of “Enemy Slayer” is on the Naxos classical music label. Her recent libretto, Nahasdzaan in the Glittering World, will make its next performance in Grenoble and Le Havre, France in 2021. She is the recipient of the Arizona Humanities Dan Schilling Public Scholar Award, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Words Writer’s Award, and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Award. She is Professor Emerita with Distinction at Arizona State University and is the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate.
Joy Young is a performance and teaching spoken word artist based in Phoenix, Az. Their performance works focuses on transgressing borders, both real and imagined, entering social justice topics through poetic personal narratives, has been featured on Button Poetry and Everyday Feminism as well as on stages and in colleges and classrooms across the country. Additionally, they are the cofounder and editor of Prickly Pear Printing, a project dedicated to highlighting written and visual work with a focus on growth, beauty, and the celebration of bodies and narratives often silenced. Whether creating storytelling curriculum for restorative justice or community engagement projects, running workshops that explore identity and what it means to be human, or performing their own poetry and stories, Joy's work seeks to cultivate strong personal narratives within a larger social justice context which is why they were selected for the 2018 Mayor's Arts Award for literature. They believe these personal narratives should be a driving force for healing ourselves and the world around us— that they are a doorway through which we should consciously enter the world of social justice in hopes of creating understanding, connection, and making substantive change.