2024 Undergraduate Poetry Award Winners

May 23, 2024

Coordinated by the UA MFA Program in Creative Writing with the UA Poetry Center

It is my pleasure to announce this year’s UA Undergraduate Poetry Awards. The Hattie Lockett Awards (three $300 prizes) and the Margaret Sterling Award (one $200 prize) are endowed awards housed in the UA Poetry Center, dating back to 1978. 
 
Continuing a tradition established last year, the awards were coordinated by graduate students in the UA MFA Program in Creative Writing. Current MFA students (of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction) worked together to call for submissions, promote the reading period, screen and discuss submissions, and choose two members of their cohort to serve as final judges. The cohort received numerous submissions from students connected to majors and minors across the university.
 
We commend all the undergraduate poets for sharing their poems with us. The judging process included many lively discussions about the submissions, conversations which pushed us all to think, feel, and work together in response to student art. The poetry we received for these awards is a testament to our undergraduates' ability to use language as a vehicle for connection. 
 
All winning poems will be published in the Sonora Review online, following this announcement.  Sonora Review, housed in and published by the UA MFA Program in Creative Writing,  is one of the oldest and most highly regarded graduate-student edited literary journals in the country. Since 1980, Sonora Review has been committed to publishing new and emerging authors alongside prominent Southwestern writers and artists.  Please help us celebrate our undergraduate authors for this honor. 
 
Please also help us thank our UA MFA in Creative Writing students for mentoring undergraduate voices in their classrooms and beyond. Special thanks are also due to UA MFA Candidate in Poetry Yvette Saenz, for her commitment to student writing and for her thoughtful organization of this year’s awards. 
 
Without further fanfare, the awards go to… 

2024 UA Undergraduate Poetry Awards

Final Judges, Dillon Clark (MFA Candidate in Poetry, Editor-in-Chief of Sonora Review) & Yvette Saenz (MFA Candidate in Poetry)*
 
The Hattie Locket Awards: Macaela Foley, Rida Amir, & Marie Elaine Evans
“Simple endings” - Macaela Foley
 
Foley’s poem lyrics its way through negotiating identity within oneself. The poem orients itself to its own music-making, continuously evolving out of its own sound as the speaker attempts to “home” their own self. As the poem works through this, it flashes different images to its reader in an attempt to work out what this process looks like—in the form of waves, skin, and sunsets, ultimately arriving, via light, at a becoming of the self: 
 
“From the blue 
Pale hale glacial rays
I become you” 
 
  • Dillon Clark
 
“Rhizo” - Rida Aamir 
 
Aamir’s poem demonstrates a working-out-of the concept of the “rhizome” in the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari. The poem arranges itself in couplets, approaching and examining disparate images in an attempt to showcase and reconcile “thought supplanting thought” in its webbing out across experience. It registers the “white noise” of existence, the varying moments of experience that one can have throughout a life, ultimately engaging in an accepting rejection of the chaos of living, preferring the presentness of one’s own body and being as a continuous state carrying one through the maelstrom:

 

“I am present, I am touch
There until the very end.” 
 
  • Dillon Clark
 
“Prey” -  Mary Elaine Evans 
 
This sonnet’s swirling musicality, technical creativity, clear emotional stakes, and associative leaps astounded its readers. A devastatingly sharp critique of traditional gender roles and a morbidly honest self-portrait, the poem fuses the sensation of being hunted with the wish to be free. Standing still to observe the monstrous shadow of the feminine ideal, the poet assesses the damage done by these ideals with a humane and truthful eye: 
 
“Safer to abandon the cushion
 than be devoured as a feast. 
Too often used as decoration; 
I’m a mounted head, a decapitation.”
  • Yvette Saenz
 
The Margaret Sterling Award: Ella Sucio
“[my home is everywhere, anywhere I choose]” -  Ella Suico 
 
This poem takes a familiar beach scene and makes it unfamiliar through the clever use of enjambment and descriptions that are immediately tangible and concrete. The gentle beauty and subtle language infuse this poem with a calm, flowing eloquence that reminds me of a latter-day Wordsworth. In this poem, there is also an embrace of imperfection, because in the imperfect, there is life: 
 
“Blue with a mood,
a temper,
a mind of its own. 
Here,
everything is alive. 
Two people dance to the out-of-tune singing” 
 
  • Yvette Saenz
 
Honorable Mentions: Tommey Jodie, North Zhang, & Faith Makarewicz
 
“An Ode to Ever-Moving Anthology” - Tommey Jodie 
 
Jodie’s poem begins by declaring an unyielding belief in language, the way language anthologizes itself throughout the natural world. Through the poem, the speaker uses language to recreate the tundras of Alyeska (Alaska) and of the Yukon, carrying its reader from the cold of winter into the thaw of summer where the speaker witnesses the speaking of the Aurora to Earth and hears the “ancient language” within themselves. As the speaker locates themselves within the various speakings of the natural world, they see a horse galloping across the tundra sky, and they ask of the horse, and by proxy the poem’s reader: 
 
“Let me follow her back, 
I am ready to go home.” 
 
  • Dillon Clark
“Revelation” -  North Zhang 
 
In this conversation at the end of the world, the poet intertwines dark humor, the small violences of intimacy, apocalyptic mania, religious obsession, and the failure of words to express what is needed at the moment when communication feels most necessary. The poem’s swerve when its world-ending revelation appears (as speaker and companion sit in no less than a “run-down subaru”) is glorious: 
 
“you took my hand as the end of all things rattled the windows
as the seven stars fell & shattered
as the wrath of your god shook our walls
& said you’d rather die than repent.”
 
  • Yvette Saenz 
 
“Dear Mother” -  Faith Ann Makarewicz 
 
This poem is a beautifully raw expression of the pain of living with a mother’s absence, showing how this loss shapes the poet’s imagination with the searching “what if?” Haunting every word, every space is a longing to know what could have been. The poet’s mourning, grief, and anger is expressed with a remarkable lyric sensitivity. So much is accomplished in the poem’s silences too: 
 
"No matter how much I yearn for your love,
I still want to drift away from it.
I am sorry mother but
What is mother's embrace like?” 
 
  • Yvette Saenz 
 
If you are interested in learning more about the UA MFA Program in Creative Writing, or the undergraduate major in Creative Writing, please reach out.
 
Congratulations again to our student writers, who we have a lot to learn from,
 
Professor Sara Sams
 
 
Judge Bios

Yvette Saenz is a writer from Alice, Texas. Currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona, she has a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University. Her work can be found most recently in The Rising Phoenix Review. 

Dillon Clark is a Queer writer from New Jersey. They are a second-year MFA student at the University of Arizona, and are Editor-in-Chief of Sonora Review. You can read some of their work in the most recent issue of the tiny. Outside of writing, they love listening to live music around Tucson and hunting for the best restaurants in town.