Photo courtesy of Izzy Toy Rettke
“I've always been a writer, ever since I was a kid,” Izzy Toy Rettke says. They will represent Wellesley College at the Glascock Poetry Contest.
The 102th Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest will take place at Mount Holyoke College on Apr. 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 Sarah Grinnell ’26
Books Editor
For Wellesley College senior Izzy Toy Rettke, poetry has been a lifelong love affair.
“I've always been a writer, ever since I was a kid making up stories with my friends,” Rettke told Mount Holyoke News in an email interview.
However, while delving deeper into poetry in high school, it was not until they arrived at college that their poetry was truly able to “take off” in a workshop class.
“That experience took my poetry from the notes app realm to something I could actually, meaningfully work with,” he explained.
Now, as one of the 2025 Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest participants, Rettke said they are most excited for people to “feel curious once they hear my poetry.”
He expanded, “I write a lot about memory/remembering, speculative themes, and things that can't be linearly or neatly expressed otherwise. So I hope that murkiness can strike an emotional chord but also leave an ultimate sense of things out of grasp, the wonderful and the strange.”
As a writer, Rettke described their affinity for writing short stories and flash fiction, noting that their stories and poems often “talk to each other in a cool way.”
As a reader, they are an avid fan of speculative fiction — especially when it deals with apocalyptic or dystopian stories — as well as microhistories, magical realism and experimental fiction. Rettke shared that one poem that really speaks to him is Diane Seuss’ sonnet “It is abominable, unquenchable by touch.”
Looking to the future, Rettke is very invested in finding ways to “preserve” their creative outlets post-graduation.
They explained, “Something I love about writing and being a writer is the community it generates, so I hope to be involved with more small presses, zines, etc where I end up post-grad, the same way I do now in college.”
And he is certainly not slowing down after Glascock; Rettke is also currently working on an undergraduate thesis of poetry that will ultimately become their first collection. So, while students and staff across the competing schools cheer them on at Glascock along with the other contestants, they can take comfort in the fact that Rettke’s already successful poetry journey is far from over.
Sofia Ramon ’27 contributed fact-checking.