From contest judge, Melissa Kwasny: “It is the poem’s immediacy that strikes me each time I read it, a north-wind immediacy that is cold, bracing, leafless. The poem contains both vigor and vulnerability: vigor in its truth-telling, vulnerability in the complexity of its emotions.”

sam sax is the author of Madness (Penguin, 2017), winner of The National Poetry Series, selected by Terrance Hayes. His second book, ‘Bury It’, will be out from Wesleyan University Press in 2018. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, and The Michener Center, where he served as the Editor-in-Chief of Bat City Review. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and the author of four chapbooks. Winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award, he has poems forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. You can learn more, here: samsax.com