The Passion has been named the winner of the 2025 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest. It will be published in early 2028 by Omnidawn Publishing and distributed by The University of Chicago Press.

My debut collection of poems is a distillation of the years I spent growing up in and around the rituals, song, speech, and idiosyncrasies of the church of which my grandfather was pastor. Despite leaving this tradition, I was nevertheless formed in its milieu, my nervous system adumbrated by its memory. In part, the book is about this carrying of memory in the physical present of the body. The speaker of these poems moves through “stations,” approximating the Christian via crucis, on a journey out of belief and inherited tradition and into the double refuge of nature and story. The Bible, particularly a Pentacostal interpretation of it, American television, Greek myth, and “creative writing” itself find purchase in poems that range from multi-page narratives in the vein of Larry Levis, to short lyrics engaged with landscape, after Charles Wright and Louise Glück. The epistle is a recurring form in the book, one of which, “Letter from Laurel Falls Camp,” forthcoming in Image Journal, takes place in North Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and addresses the writer, LGBTQ advocate, and Civil Rights activist Lilian E. Smith. Ultimately, The Passion is an affectionate lingering over Southern Appalachia, a landscape I continue to love, and the working class people who attempt to find some dignity in it, despite the many forces working against this pursuit.

For more, visit Omnidawn.com.