Announcing the Results of the 2025 Helena Whitehill Award
Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge Deborah Paredez has selected VIRGA by Cameron McGill of Bellingham, Washington as winner of the 2025 Helena Whitehill Book Award.
Cameron McGill is a poet and songwriter from Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of In the Night Field (Augury Books) and Meridians (Willow Springs Books). His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Kenyon Review, Outskirts, and Poetry Ireland Review. In 2022, he released his seventh studio album, The Widow Cameron. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Western Colorado University and at Washington State University, where he co-directs the Visiting Writers Series and a poetry study abroad to Ireland.
Here’s what Jeffrey Levine, Artistic Director of Tupelo Press, writes:
In VIRGA, Cameron McGill presents a collection of remarkable composure and depth, distinguished by its sustained attentiveness to family, memory, illness, and the ethical weight of love. These poems inhabit thresholds—between generations, between the physical body and its fragilities, between belief and doubt—with a clarity that emerges from restraint rather than resolution. Grounded in the textures of ordinary life—kitchens, hospital rooms, rural roads, domestic interiors—the work opens outward toward cosmological and metaphysical inquiry, allowing the personal and the universal to
remain in active, resonant tension. McGill’s formal control is matched by emotional risk: the language is precise, musical, and lucid, yet permeable to grief, wonder, and tenderness. Throughout the manuscript, silence is granted as much authority as statement, and lyric attention becomes an act of moral witnessing. VIRGA is a cohesive and mature book of rare quiet power, deserving of recognition for its intelligence, its emotional integrity, and its lasting beauty.
We offer our sincere congratulations to Cameron McGill, and as well, to every finalist and semifinalist. This was an especially rich and rewarding group of manuscripts!
Winner, Runner-up & Finalists for the
2025 Helena Whitehill Book Award:
Winner:
Cameron McGill, VIRGA
Runner up:
Allison Pitinii Davis, Outskirts
Finalists:
Eric Julian Baker, 목 | mok
Deborah Bernhardt, Nonlocal
Bruce Bond, The O at the End of the World
Laura Bylenok, Shrapnel 1994
Joseph J. Capista, Right Sky, Wrong Stars
Fay Dillof, Invisible Waves of Heat
Geffrey Davis, No Good Ghost
Kylie Q. Gellatly, Butcher
Lauren Myers-Hinkle, Phantom Ride
Bino Realuyo, #TheRebelSonnets
Kristen Sanders, Reviews of Rooms and Lovers
Kent Shaw, Gigantic
Semifinalists:
Vasiliki Albedo, The Tongue Has No Bones
Kanika Agrawal, Okazaki Fragments
Brent Armendinger, Broken Water Highway
Mary-Kim Arnold, Precipice in Front, Wolves Behind
Cody Clevidence, First Spokes
Andrew Collard, Skin / Routes
Judith Fox, Little Garden All Around
Sara Heady, The Hudson Lines
Laura Kolbe, The Decadent Movement
Susan Lewis, Life Sentences
Maja Lukic, Last Call
Jaza Mya, Ghostbone
Brad Aaron Modlin, No Earth But This
Ellene Glenn Moore, Provenance
JoAnna Novack, High Place Phenomenon
Jose Oseguera, [untitled mother]
Nome Emeka Patrick, All the Stars Witnessing
Tim Peterson, Mementos Mori
Donald Platt, Essential Tremor
Martha Ronk, Infused By
Henk Rossouw, Broken Animal
Edward Sambrano III, The Syntax of Thursday
Yetta Stein, Puddle
Katharine Whitcomb, The Earth Clock
Adele Williams, Sacrosanct
So much gratitude to our terrific readers, to the Whitehill family, sponsors of this distinguished award, and to this year’s judge, Deborah Paredez. Deborah is a poet and cultural critic. She is the author of the poetry volumes This Side of Skin (Wings Press
2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), and the critical study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke UP, 2009). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Poetry magazine, the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston
Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the cofounder and for a decade served as codirector (2009-2019) of CantoMundo https://www.cantomundo.org/ a national organization for Latinx poets. She teaches creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University.
Our heart-felt gratitude goes out to all who sent us your manuscripts and who, by your writing, link arms in the tireless, solitary, and so-important work of making poetry. So many more manuscripts than we can mention here gave us countless hours of reading pleasure. We sincerely hope you will consider letting us see your work again. Our annual Snowbound Chapbook Prize is open through February 28th, and our Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry closes to submissions on April 31st. In July and August, we read open submissions.
Thank you, hold onto your spiritual forces, and we look forward to reading your work!