Photo courtesy of Ria deGuzman
Ria deGuzman will represent Smith College at the Glascock Poetry Contest next week. “I like writing poems that are puzzles,” she says.
The 102th Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest will take place at Mount Holyoke College on April 3 and 4, 2025. It is the oldest continuously-running intercollegiate poetry contest in the country. This year, all of the contestants hail from either historically women’s colleges or gender-diverse women’s colleges. In the days leading up to the contest, Mount Holyoke News will be releasing digital-exclusive profiles of each poet-contestant.
By Tara Monastesse ’25
Editor-in-Chief
“I love poetry” is a constant, dreamy refrain from Ria deGuzman, who will be competing in the 2025 Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest. In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, deGuzman expressed her love for the craft in every sense, from writing poems to talking about them with others and forming literary communities that welcome all writers.
“I feel like the community aspect of poetry is part of what's so appealing to me,” she said. “Writing a poem is so fundamentally connected to one's internal landscape and then externalizing it and sharing it, and that's really what I'm totally obsessed with.”
DeGuzman, who will graduate from Smith College this spring, is an Ada Comstock scholar — a program analogous to Mount Holyoke College’s own Frances Perkins Program that allows students of nontraditional college age to complete a bachelor's degree. Students in both programs form a unique community; deGuzman recalls attending the annual FP Monologues at Mount Holyoke in 2023 and hearing Ace Chandler FP ’26, who competed in the 2023 Glascock competition, reciting some of their own poetry.
“There's a whole culture, I think, in the Ada Comstock Program of creatives and poets,” deGuzman said. “And it's been so motivating to become embedded in a community where those options seem like they're even possibilities, you know. I'm so, so inspired by my classmates.”
DeGuzman initially dropped out of community college when she was 19 years old, around the time her mother died. After about a decade working for an outdoor care retailer, she resumed her education at Mercer County Community College in 2020, where professor and working poet Nicole Homer inspired her to pursue poetry. Initially intending to attend Smith and become a therapist, she soon became deeply involved with the campus’s literary community.
“I had no idea that there was so much poetry stuff happening in Western Mass, and at Smith as well,” deGuzman said. “I finally gave myself a rationale to go back to school for a very practical reason, and then immediately was just like, ‘Ah, but poetry!’ [I] deviated from that plan, and I was just like, ‘I'll see how far this takes me.’”
DeGuzman is majoring in English with a focus on creative writing. She’s also pursuing a concentration in collaborative innovation, which she describes as being focused on “decentralizing power dynamics and leadership,” though that hasn’t stopped her from additionally taking all of the courses included in the poetry concentration.
Outside of her studies, deGuzman works at Smith’s Boutelle-Day Poetry Center and is the founder and head facilitator of the Northampton Literary Society, which holds workshops, open mics and other community events. She has also interned at the summer writing retreat Witches and Warriors, working alongside poets Franny Choi, a former Glascock Poetry Contest judge, and Tamiko Beyer.
The poems she will read at the Glascock competition navigate themes of grief, memory and absence, exploring her relationships with her late mother and grandfather. Fragmentation is also a recurring theme throughout deGuzman’s work. “I like writing poems that are puzzles,” she said.
DeGuzman wants her listeners to “feel something that I can’t anticipate,” surprising them with an unexpected emotional response. However, she says that putting her poetry out into the world is secondary to the act of creation itself.
“I don’t think about people interacting with my writing,” she said. “I write poetry to survive.”
DeGuzman has been accepted to multiple MFA programs, and is currently weighing her post-graduate options. What matters the most to her, however, is creating accessible spaces for writers of all backgrounds to engage with their craft.
“Everybody ‘gets’ poetry,” she said. “Everyone should write poetry. They should just write their own thing, and they never, ever have to show it to anyone.”
Quill Nishi-Leonard ’27 contributed fact-checking.