North American Review presents the winners of the 2021 Annual James Hearst Poetry Prize. We thank each poet who submitted content to this contest and congratulate this year's winners.
First Place
“Geneva Avenue” – Kristen Abel
Runner-Up
“Snowfall” – Tim Nolan
Honorable Mention
“Beneath the Mammatus Sky” – Hannah Smith
Finalists
“At the Museum of Natural History” – Elizabeth Diebold
“Boy Wears Bra” – Halsey Hyer
“What I Know about the Last Lynching in Jeff Davis County” – Todd Davis
“Covid 19/Amyloidosis” – Steve McDonald
“My Daughter Asks Are You Not Good at Seeing in the Dark” – Sean Dougherty
“Hero Myth” – David N. Moolten
“Unbirth” – Alex Chertok
“Double-Portrait at Amusement Park” – Jared Harél
“A Story” – Bill Hollands
“This Bird is Trying to Break Your Heart” – Courtney Huse Wika
“My Heart is a Small-town Zoo” – Kathleen Tibbetts
“Sonnet with Jury and Sunset” – Robert Thomas
“Waking Up in the Evening” – Steven Monte
“You Are Happily Married” – Todd Smith
About the Judge
Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, as well as Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Washington Post, the Guardian, The Nation, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally, and Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.” Smith’s next book, a memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, will be published by One Signal/Atria in April 2023.