POLY ETHNIC STUDIES MAJOR WINS ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS PRIZE

Zora Sowinska, a Cal Poly student majoring in Ethnic Studies and minoring in English, has won this year’s Academy of American Poets Contest for her poem “A Visit to Lisamu.’” She will receive a $100 award from the Academy and will also be considered for the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award, which comes with a cash prize of $1,000 and publication in American Poets magazine.

Award-winning local poet Luke Johnson judged this year’s contest. Johnson said of “A Visit to Lisamu’”: “It’s difficult to write a nature poem tied to our humanity and inner world. Sowinska’s poem has a fresh use of caesura to build immediacy and represent the movement of otters in water with the general displacement we feel so often among the living.” Honorable mention goes to English major Owen Stokes for his poem “Dawn Chorus.” Johnson noted how the poem “spills down the page with surprise and vibrancy. Its synaptic leaps lure its reader onward, line by line by line."

Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press, 2023), A Slow Indwelling (Harbor Editions, 2024) and Distributary, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in the fall of 2025. Quiver was long listed for the 2025 Kate Tufts Award and a finalist for the 2024 California Book Award. Johnson was recently awarded runner up for the Robert Frost Residency through Dartmouth College. You can find more of his work at Poetry Daily, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere.

The Cal Poly English Department and the Academy of American Poets, which is a longstanding advocate for the art of poetry and is located in New York City, sponsor the contest. The winning poems are available on the English department’s website, and Sowinska’s “A Visit to Lisamu’” will also appear on the University & College Poetry Prize page of Poets.org.