2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize Winner
Out of over seventy submissions to our 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize Contest, twenty submissions were selected for the longlist, which was further narrowed down to a group of nine finalists.
The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce that the winner for the 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize is:
Maya Williams, winner of our 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize
Feminine Morbidity
by Maya Williams
"As with all we tend, love is not linear. Some moments it breaks, others it flees like a comb from hair but it is here - where doubt ends and faith begins - that we find this dazzling collection of poems, moving us from our own understanding of expectation to the dream of reimagining. In Feminine Morbidity, we find an unapologetic writer able to walk the fine line of surprise and devotion, upending the long-held history of Western birthright and belonging. A lens that is at once an embodiment of resilience and uplift, this work is one of intention and reassertion. In an elevation of lineage and identity, Williams illustrates the true spark of liberation, acknowledging the spirit and language owed to that which we build in place of the empire."
— Olatunde Osinaike, 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize Judge
Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who was selected as Portland, ME's seventh poet laureate for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Eir debut poetry collection Judas & Suicide was selected as a finalist for a New England Book Award. Their second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date, was selected as a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. Their third poetry collection, What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway?, was selected as one of four winners of Garden Party Collective's chapbook prize in 2024.
Congratulations, Maya!
About Our Judge
Olatunde Osinaike, judge of our 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. Selected in 2024 as the Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, he is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books), winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, shortlisted for the Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry and Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize.
He is also author of the limited-edition chapbooks Speech Therapy (TAR) and The New Knew (Thirty West). Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and Frontier Industry Prize, semifinalist for the Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry.
His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Hub, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, New Poetry from the Midwest, Obsidian, Wildness, and elsewhere.
