2025 Schedule

Poetry Reading Featuring this Year's Poetry Winners & Professional Poets
Thursday, March 13 at 7pm
Location:  The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street

Essay & Short Story Reading Featuring this Year's Winners (Check back for full list)
Friday, March 14 at 7pm
Location: The Bethesdan Hotel, 8120 Wisconsin Avenue
 

The 2025 Poetry Reading and Awards Ceremony  will feature readings by Courtney LeBlanc and Alexa Patrick.

Courtney LeBlanc is author of the full length collections Her Whole Bright Life, winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize (Write Bloody, 2023), Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart (Riot in Your Throat, 2021), and Beautiful & Full of Monsters (VA Press, 2020). Her next collection, Her Dark Everything is forthcoming in April 2025 from Riot in Your Throat. She is the Arlington Poet Laureate, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow (2022), and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com.

Alexa Patrick (she/her) is a vocalist and poet from Connecticut. She is the author of Remedies for Disappearing (Haymarket Books, 2023) and holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and more. Previous artistic partnerships of Alexa’s include Meta, Microsoft, The Kennedy Center, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. In spring 2023, Alexa made her stage production debut as Un/Sung in the opera We Shall Not Be Moved, (dire. Bill T. Jones). You may find her work in publications including Adroit, The Rumpus, CRWN Magazine, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Visit alexapatrick.com for more.