Photo courtesy of Amanda Adams
Glascock contestants pose for a photo with the poet-judges in the Williston Memorial Library’s Stimson Room, located on its sixth floor, North Stacks.
By Sarah Grinnell ’26
Books Editor
“Y’all made this a very difficult decision,” Kiki Petrosino joked alongside her fellow poet-judges, Dora Malech and Kirun Kapur, as students and faculty gathered in the Stimson Room on Friday, April 4 to await the results of the 102nd Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest.
Petrosino’s words were no understatement, as the readings the day before in Gamble Auditorium highlighted the talent of this year’s contestants and the tall order that lay ahead of the judges.
From Sylvia Plath and James Merrill, to Audre Lorde and Robert Frost, the Glascock contest has hosted some of the nation’s most renowned poets as both contestants and judges throughout its history. It has occurred regularly since 1923, making it the oldest continuously running poetry contest for undergraduate students in the United States.
This year’s competition marks the first time in 97 years that all the contestants have represented historically women’s and gender-diverse colleges, with student-poets hailing from Hollins, Smith, Spelman, Vassar, Wellesley and, of course, Mount Holyoke College.
The festivities kicked off with the contestants’ reading on Thursday, April 3. After a welcome by Visiting Assistant Professor in English Lucas de Lima — who filled in for Associate Professor of English Anna Maria Hong, the chair of this year’s competition committee — the contestants took to the podium.
Ria deGuzman, Smith College’s contestant, was the first to read a touching selection of poems exploring the body, ancestry and intergenerational longing. This desperation for self-knowledge came through especially in “PEOPLE LIVE HERE,” read with a breathy and urgent cadence. At the judges’ reading on Friday, April 4, the judges commended deGuzman for her “lyrical gifts” exhibited in her stirring exploration of “the voice and its echoes.”
Next was Vassar College contestant Miley Lu. A standout poem was “mother : morpho : man.” Holding powerful eye contact with the audience and delivering an emotionally-charged reading, Lu addressed the genre itself in her refrain of “o poem” to explore the limits of language in the face of real-world violence and personal traumas. Lu was praised by the judges for their “smart, surprising and self-aware” words.
Following Lu was Izzy Toy Rettke of Wellesley College. Eliciting scattered chuckles throughout his reading, Rettke skillfully oscillated between humor and poignant portrayals of volatile relationships and gender identity, with sparse yet hard-hitting language. The judges said that the “scarcity” of Rettke’s language “brings us into the poem’s moment to feel for ourselves.”
AT Rhodes, Spelman College’s contestant, immediately commanded the stage by encouraging the audience to react to and engage with their work as they read. Striking in both their descriptions and inflections, Rhodes' blend of colloquial and academic language gave their poems a musical vibrancy and distinct voice that arrested the judges, who highlighted their admiration for Rhodes’ “electric storehouse of materials” and “confident command” over their subject matter.
Elani Spencer from Hollins University was also a dynamic presence, bringing some spoken-word energy to her reading by using hand gestures to enliven poems that touched on themes of family, community, ancestry and girlhood. The judges were particularly struck by her “expansive vision” of the experiences of women across generations.
Last to read was Mount Holyoke College’s own Charlie Watts ’25, whose poems offered a thought-provoking portrayal of coming-of-age, from mother/daughter relationships, the evolving relationship with the city one grows up in and an “elegy” for their first car. The judges aptly praised the “bravado and swagger” of their words.
Attendees also had the opportunity to hear poems by the contest’s renowned poet-judges on Friday in the Stimson Room, before the winners were announced.
Kirun Kapur began by highlighting the “illustrious history” of Glascock and expressing her confidence that the future of poetry is likewise “in good hands” with the rising poets before her. She then read from her first collection as well as her most recent work, “Women in the Waiting Room,” which explores gendered violence, womanhood, shame and the varying empowerment found in both silence and speech.
Dora Malech followed by reading from her collections “Soundings” and “Say So.” Malech’s revelry in word-play and sound was on full display in her selected poems that probe the slippages and subversions of the written word, with self-aware themes ranging from love, living abroad and what she joked were “some weirdly sexy poems.”
Finally, Kiki Petrusino read from her most recent collection, “White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia,” in which she confronts mixed race identity, historical memory and the ways slavery bears residual traces in architecture and archives. Many poems reflect on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson as the founder of the University of Virginia and of America itself in tandem with her efforts to give voice back to her own ancestors.
After much anticipation and much thanks to the Glascock Committee, the judges ultimately dubbed AT Rhodes and Ria deGuzman as the joint winners of the 2025 competition.
As Petrosino said towards the conclusion of the Judges’ Reading, “popular discourse” in the current day often sees poetry as “to the side of a larger conversation.” But Petrosino stressed that “poets are at the center” of some of the most urgent questions of our day. If the words of these young poets are any indication of where that conversation can go, Kapur was correct that we are, indeed, in good hands.
Eden Copeland ’27 contributed fact-checking.