Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge, Carolyn Forché, has selected INFINITE SCROLL // INFINITE EYE by Martin Rock of Solana Beach, California as the winner of the 2025 Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry. Martin Rock will receive a $3,000 cash prize, in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 20 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and international distribution with energetic publicity and promotion. All manuscripts were judged anonymously.
Martin Rock is a poet, translator, editor, book designer, and educator living in San Diego. He is the author of Residuum (CSU Poetry Center First Book Prize) and the chapbooks Dear Mark (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Fish, You Bird (co-written with Phillip D. Ischy, Pilot Books). Chosen by poet Nicky Beer for the Donald Barthelme Prize in poetry, his work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Best New Poets, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His translations of Japanese poetry have been featured in Asymptote. A former senior editor at Washington Square Review, Gulf Coast, and Epiphany, he co-directs the Unsung Masters Series with Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller. Co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets (Wesleyan), Martin also co-edited the critical volume Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades). He teaches writing and climate justice at UC San Diego.
Finalists for the 2025 Berkshire Prize
All the Everlastings by Gabriella Josephine Klein of Santa Barbara, California.
A White Horse Is Not a Horse by Angelo Mao of Charlottesville, Virginia.
PROVENANCE by Ellene Moore of Zurich, Switzerland.
Early Medicine by Rachel Morgan of Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Windshear by Christopher Nelson of Grinnell, Iowa.
The Other Test of Time by Suphil Lee Park of Cresskill, New Jersey.
Nine and a Half Letters to Jack Spicer by SJ Pierce of New York, New York.
Distant Possessions by José Edmundo Reyes of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.
Broken Animal by Henk Rossouw of Concord, Massachusetts.
Weeds and Stars by Lisa Rosenberg of Menlo Park, California.
Tongue(s)-Tied by Xemina Keogh Serrano of Portland Oregon.
The Errant by Gnaomi Siemens of New York, New York.
Ceiba by Julio César Villegas of Belleville, New Jersey.
Small Craft by Jane Zwart of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Congratulations also to our outstanding roster of semi-finalists:
Running Away Without a Walkable City by Hanif Abdurragib of Columbus, Ohio.
Collective by Katie Berta of Tempe, Arizona.
BELIEVERS by Samuel Cheney of Baltimore, Maryland.
Crowd Noise by Stephen Danos of Portland, Oregon.
Pyrrhic Symphony by Adam O. Davis of San Diego, California.
Imitator by Emma De Lisle of Florence, Massachusetts.
The Lamp and Other Sources of Shadow by Abigail Dembo of Iowa City, Iowa.
not this by Josh English of Montclair, New Jersey.
Why on Earth by Mag Gabbert of Dallas, Texas.
Yu: Territory, Desire by Xinyue Huang of New York, New York.
AND AFTER THE FIRE by Rachel Kaufman of Los Angeles, California.
peregrine, a hiding by Aaron Lopatin of Brooklyn, New York.
No Earth But This by Brad Aaron Modlin of Kearney, Nebraska.
Seven Shades of Dust by Jaza Mya of Paris, France.
Circuitry by Emily Oliver of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
#TheRebelSonnets by Bino Realuyo of New York, New York.
A Newcomer’s Calendar by Wei Shao of Tustin, California.
Porcupine Diary by Andrew Seguin of New York, New York.
The Campus Novel by Matthew Weitman of Houston, Texas.
Orange Blossom Sugar by Emily Paige Wilson of Asheville, North Carolina.
Enormous thanks as well to our terrific readers and judge, Carolyn Forché.
Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and also Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History (1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us (1982), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize.
She is also the author of a prose book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), winner of Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award
She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, Lasse Söderberg, Fernando Valverde and Mahmoud Darwish. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990, Lannan Foundation. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
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.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we hope you will consider letting us see your full-length manuscript again, as our annual Summer Open Reading Period is currently open until August 31st. Thank you and we look forward to reading your work!