We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 2024 Open Reading Period Book Prize, Editors' Pick, and Carolyn Bush Award. Each of these titles will be released as part of the Passage Series, devoted to supporting emerging writers and artists whose work manifests in innovative, hybrid, and cross-genre forms that imagine new possibilities and expressions of the poetic, the political, and the social.
Book Prize, selected by Bhanu Kapil
kathy wu, She Will Last as Long as Stones
Weaving together the matter of geology, migration, and computation, kathy wu’s debut book She Will Last as Long as Stones mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care. Through text, photo-collage, and diagrammatic circuitry, wu mobilizes language toward the edges of things, where glitch and failure meet grief, outpour.
kathy wu (she/they) is a Chinese–American artist, poet, and designer living in Providence, RI, on Narragansett land. She works across digital media, fiber, book arts, and language to pull at histories of science and technology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from The New School, Dialogist, Rain Taxi, NatBrut, and Tilted House, and has been anthologized by Fonograf Editions and Nightboat Books. She has been awarded fine arts residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Black Mountain College Museum, and Pao Arts Center. She currently teaches full-time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and holds an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts.
Fall 2025
Passage Series #12
Photo: Riley Ratliff
Editors' Pick
Zoe Imani Sharpe, Figure Eight
Addressed to Negation itself, these poems illuminate its dimensions and folds, voids and volumes, absences and dislocations. Rendering the density between places, centuries, buildings, bodies, and language—as a record and method—Zoe Imani Sharpe asks how desire is structured and, inversely, how it restructures itself at the point of loss. Figure Eight entangles the discrete categories of figure and ground, illustrating in the negative and double negative a poetry of fossilization and fog, of residue and recess.
Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet, teacher, and workshop-maker based in Tkaronto (Toronto), Canada. Her poetry and essays have appeared in YYZ Artists’ Outlet, carteblanche, and The Capilano Review, among others. Her recent collaborations include the digital anthology Bout That Life (Gallery TPW), the creative-process workshop WhAt She SAid: Promiscuous References & Disobedient Care (Contingencies of Care, OCADU), and the ongoing intersubjective text, Power, Baby! (with Claire Freeman-Fawcett).
Winter 2026
Passage Series #13
Photo: Sarah Bodri
Carolyn Bush Award
Gia Gonzales, Gia Gonzales
In her debut book of poetry, Gia Gonzales, Gia Gonzales takes up the eponymous character as a cipher. Though the book’s title suggests autobiography or memoir, these are merely ribbons on the skirt of Gonzales’s Gia. Like syntax, the self becomes a “pattern of patterns” in these poems, until Gia becomes too unruly for the author to contain.
Gia Gonzales is a poet based in New York City, where she was born. She is the author of the chaplet From Gia Gonzales (Belladonna* Collaborative) and the chapbook RENDER SLEAZE (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). In 2023 to 2024, she was an Emerge-Surface-Be fellow at the Poetry Project. Currently, she is an editor-at-large for Nightboat Books.
Fall 2026
Passage Series #14
Photo: Zack Wilks
Open Reading Period Finalists:
Jay Gao, The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in the Ear, Thriving Slumber
Michelle Phương Hồ, Bone Symphony
Bo Hwang, Nightlaps
Megan Sungyoon, M-OTHER-TONGUE-S
eunsun whang, A SONG FOR THE KAYAGŬM
Carolyn Bush Award Finalists:
Aristilde Kirby
imogen xtine smith & alma valdez-garcia
Irene Hsu
Leanne Tory-Murphy
Sahar Khraibani