Eduardo C. Corral, this year’s judge, has chosen My North County by Alfredo Aguilar of Lockhart, TX as the 2025 Akron Poetry Prize winner. The contest received a total of 586 entries in 2025.
Regarding the winning manuscript, Corral states:
In My North County, by Alfredo Aguilar, the poems never reveal just one narrative. When he writes about living as an adult in Texas or growing up in San Diego as the child of Mexican immigrants, he often weaves in history and an array of emotional and intellectual states, like gratitude or anger. Gratitude for how parental sacrifice has allowed him to pursue his own path in this country. Anger toward the never-ending cruelty of immigration policies. Anger toward language itself: poems will not halt deportations. Aguilar braids memory, history, and self-awareness deftly, beautifully. The speaker is three-dimensional, attuned to tenderness and ruptures. I was jolted and delighted by Aguilar’s language time and again. He moves from high lyric to narrative-rich poems with ease. My North County is an impactful and remarkable book.
Alfredo Aguilar is the author of the poetry collection On This Side of the Desert. He received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and has been awarded support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts. His work has appeared in The Yale Review, Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North County San Diego, he currently resides in Central Texas.
The judge for the 2026 Akron Poetry Prize competition will be Brenda Shaughnessy.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the Okinawan-Irish American poet whose books of poetry include The Octopus Museum, Our Andromeda, Interior with Sudden Joy, and the forthcoming Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse. A Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark, Shaughnessy lives with her family in New Jersey.
The guidelines for the annual Akron Poetry Prize competition may be found here.
2025 Akron Poetry Prize Finalists
Braid the Dark Hair She Gave You by Kaitlyn Airy
Modern Survival by Margaret Cipriano
Devil Music by Charlie Clark
Singing Ground by Samantha DeFlitch
and the pool becomes the sky by Fay Dillof
Why on Earth by Mag Gabbert
At First I Was an Island by Eugene Gloria
Dis-/appear by Benjamin Landry
At the Bottom of the Sea with One Light by Alejandro Lucero
Danse Macabre by Matthew Minicucci
The Everything Theory of Kissmaking by Rebecca Pinwei Tseng
Telling the Bees by Mat Wenzel
King For a Day by Jeff Whitney