The Georgia Review congratulates Mercedes Rodriguez, who was selected by judge Brandon Som as the winner of this year’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Rodriguez will receive an honorarium of $1,500 for their poem “Diabetes,” which will be published in our Spring 2026 issue.
Of Rodriguez’s poem, Som wrote:
“This poem speaks to the complexity of grief with honesty, humor, and humility. From its first line, the poem had me with that surprise gesture of a cake—both offering and spaceship—launched toward the ‘firmament.’ As I continued to read this elegy for a father, I was struck by how the poet understands the form as a vessel among vessels—the phone, the coffin, the mirror, the grave—and how death and loss resist each container’s framing, how the spirit ultimately ‘resists this dimension.’ The poet’s resistance is to chronicle the everyday and the material. The poem continually returns us to the body, wryly observing its hungers and desires as well as its sufferings from and battle with diabetes, a disease disproportionately higher in marginalized communities, particularly working-class ones. The body like the spirit is also irreducible to the poet’s own lines and figures, including the startling ones that close this poem (in poetry, of course, we measure the verse line in feet). An astounding poem, ‘Diabetes’ ends with ‘gore’ and with excess: all that resists the symmetry (and rations) of the previous lines, the ‘everything that reveals itself’ within and beyond this poem’s deftly measured craft.”
Mercedes Rodriguez is a poet and educator from Los Angeles. Nominated for Best New Poets, their work appears or is forthcoming in New England Review, Washington Square Review, New Delta Review, wildness, Bellingham Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Their work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts. They hold an MFA from North Carolina State University and read for Okay Donkey Magazine.
We would like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. More information about the contest is available here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Loraine Williams Poetry Prize opens again in March 2026.
2025 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner and Finalists
Winner:
“Diabetes” by Mercedes Rodriguez
Finalists:
“Mary’s Renunciation” by Ali C
“Elegy Drafts” by Matt Donovan
“preface to my father’s suicide note” by Amir Denzel Hall
“[Unknown]” by Kyle Okeke
“Quadriptych of Terrible Situations” by Weijia Pan
“I Have a Name” by Tommer Peterson
“Luna, Luna Dame Pan” by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
“time and matter (LA CA)” by Martha Ronk
“Sick Goat” by Talin Tahajian
“My Father’s Mother” by Alison Zheng
“Once a Chinese Girl Mistook ‘Abecedarian’ for ‘Obsidian’” by Li Zhuang