2025 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize winners
Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize!
Junior category (grades 7-9)
Senior category (grades 10-12)
Read the winning poems
Selected by juror Jacob McArthur Mooney
Click to read individual poems, or find all poems at the bottom of this page.
Honorable mentions
Thanks to the generous support of the Jessamy Stursberg Endowment Fund, the League also produces an annual chapbook of the most notable submissions from the Jessamy Stursburg Poetry Prize. In addition to the winning poems, The Next Generation Volume VI will include six additional poets!
Winning poems
Ars Fami
By Angela Xiao
The aluminum suturing your mother
is a blackening peel. Should you not split it,
let the gore-light of her heart
throb against the air, let her ribs
sing rust where we press our fingerprints?
The heat gnawing your mother’s eyes
is a maw of good fire, hungry fire.
Should you not drown it in your mouth,
so she can watch our shadows lick the wall,
two wolves chewing the same last coal—
Your mother’s stomach is a gutted bell.
Should you not tongue its clapper,
let the hollow teach you how hunger
outgrows the body? Listen:
even the flies refuse to choir
this silence. Should you not
kneel here and starve with me,
until our throats are the same
rusted flute?
We could stay here, yes? Two bodies
sewn to the wall by our own sweating hands.
Should you not plant me like your mother,
but let me root in your arms, a bloom
fattened on spoiled light, until our skeletons
are one crooked ladder?
and when our daughter cracks us open
like a geode, she’ll find the honey
still crawling as the rot sings in our throats.
When she lifts the veil of rust between
our lives and hers,
should you not whisper through my
wax-stiffened lips and aluminum skin:
leave us be,
the living make poor relics,
and we were never holy,
just hungry?
to be used as you use your dog—
By Tracy Wang
after a line from shakespeare's a midsummer night's dream
i place the carcass of a bird
prostrate at your feet; hands and knees,
begging—a starving thing gone feral.
i cannot choke up the desire lodged in
my throat. god birthed me hungry—i am two halves
of a whole ribcage scraped clean, dressing
an altar in offerings—packing tape & sandwich
crusts & semiplume. you get really good
at making a dead thing look alive, making
dying seem graceful—shrouded in ribbons and white
lace—shall i strangle myself with the leash of my own
longing, lonely like a creature that loves
without being good for anything else?
tell me i’m the only beast that matters. leave me
in the car on a hot summer’s day. i’ll watch the pigeons in
the park & want for nothing more than
weightlessness—yes, a dead dog will forgive
you. a dead dog is just happy
you’re here—yes, i get so jealous of euthanized dogs.
i will sink my teeth into the hands that feed
me. ask me about devotion & i’ll tell you about violence
i’m going to die in the universe i loved you in and i’m waiting
for you to come home
-write this down!
By Lovisa Goodwill
I wrote this down somewhere—
I swear I did.
Maybe in the notes app, between grocery lists
and my half-finished dream journal entries,
or on the back of a napkin I used to wipe off my lip gloss.
Or maybe I never wrote it at all.
It was about memory.
Or loss.
Or how they’re usually the same thing.
I was walking home when I thought of it,
under streetlights that kept flickering out
like they were embarrassed to be seen with me.
It was cold. —I never wear a good enough coat—
My hands were in my pockets.
I remember thinking:
Write this down before you forget.
And for a while, I did remember.
The first line.
Then the second.
Then the way it all fit together so perfectly,
like a mosaic.
But then—
I don’t know when exactly, but does it matter?
—The first line disappeared.
Then the second.
Then the whole damn thing.
Like it got bored of itself and left.
Somewhere, someone’s erasing my name.
Somewhere, someone’s forgetting my face.
I meant to say something about that—
about how it happens so slowly
you don’t even notice,
until one day someone calls you by the wrong name,
and you don’t correct them.
I had a whole metaphor for it.
Something about a sandcastle at high tide,
or a Polaroid left too long in the sun.
But I can’t remember
I’ll forget this one soon enough as well.
Sea lions take beach days in wintertime
By Eliot Scott
My mom got a name like a too small pair of shoes. Oma named her after a princess. She wanted to play with GI Joes and mud. Left half her name stuck in the lime shag carpet of my grandparents’ basement on her way out of Edmonton. Became Marg. When I was born, I think she didn’t want me to be stuck with something that would never fit. Maybe we call our kids the names we wish we were given.
My name is me with short hair, happy in my cargo shorts and purple shirt and you coming to tell me my joy confuses you. That I don’t belong. “What are you? Are you a boy or a girl?”
“I’mma octopus!” I’d say laughing, but it hurt like alcohol wipes on a scraped knee. It’s being tuned in to a different radio station than everyone else, always close, but never on the right frequency. Would I have been normal if I’d been called Emma? Probably not.
My name is waking up in the night to the crashing of a waterfall outside my tent. Lonely noise opening up the darkness and silence of the backcountry. Bright coloured Lego bricks. Marine life. Sunshine yellow. Soft ukulele music. The feeling of sprinting to the cross-country finish line. It’s being thrilled with the sea lions lounging on the beach, in winter.
My name is me at 4 on the playground. Telling a woman I didn’t know “My name is Eliot. Some people think that’s a boy’s name, but I’m a girl.” I made an impression. When her baby was born, she called her Eliot. An invisible thread connecting me to this family. Ellie, they call her, is 13 now. I see her around.
My name was you. Yelling across the kitchen table, both of us strapped into our highchairs. “Eh-yit! Eh-yit!” And me hollering back to you. “Tah-ya! Tah-ya!” Now my name is me. Writing you letters and text messages. Trying to fit the same loud toddler love into words.
I use your new name. Learn Minecraft. Ask for an earbud even though I don’t like metal. Random emojis. Endless puns. Silly cat pictures translate to “I love u. I hope you’re ok?”
Latitude of Roots
By Shuyu Zheng
At birth, the knot's curve in my cord defined
The softest fold of borders' crimson crest
Mother's milk brewed in dialect now swells
To monsoon-soaked fields where my throat finds rest
Father carves our lineage down my spine
Each bone sprouts new roots when we realign
Surnames scattered overseas now bend
As question marks in foreign soil's design
Passport stamps tile ancestral eaves with time
Rain bleaches vowels where consonants entwine
When migratory wings score the sky's skin
My homeland hums between these ribs of mine
Tonight I pluck my rib to paddle through
The map's unhealed wound, still tender-blue
All dandelion exiles know this truth—
Deep in humus cradles dawn's endless bloom
Blossoming
By Michelle Masood
It’s spring & my hair has grown out again. Like history, everything moves
in cycles of growth then unexpansion. The street where all my deepest
recollections backflow & rush to the front. The magnolias that yawn over
onto the sidewalk past the fence. Those small piles of litter recessed into my memory.
Aprils obscure themselves like layers of cellophane
blurring into a dizzy flushed mess. I’m pink too, with envy.
Once a better poet than I made eye contact with me for at least three minutes
& I hid, blushing, for the rest of the day. People kept passing my hot face
mistaking me for a new cheap replacement for spring foliage.
It was winter & I was unconcerned with the future or appearances.
Now just one tree is full of flowers unfolding like birds.
How am I supposed to compete with that?
In a floral skirt on the path to enlightenment I gave up
on love finding me & nothing changed. I guess a butterfly mid-heatstroke
took some shaded refuge on the red & white polyester
but I didn’t take it as a sign of anything. After three summers
falsely declared to be the summer of love only for them to turn out
summers of unbearable sadness, whole jars of olives, mandarin pop,
I saved all my suffering for spring, where I at least could be miserable
surrounded by chic pinks. That strip of sidewalk where we didn’t kiss
is wearing half-dead petals like a perfumed rug. My nails
are painted with ugly purple fashionings of plant life.
After some liberated months I finally spent an hour re-shaving my legs,
spraying perfume that smells like jam, plucking flowers so they wilt in my hair.
I am trying very hard to be beautiful.