We are pleased to announce that the winner of the inaugural First Things Poetry Prize is Josiah A. R. Cox for his poem “Two Owls.” Amit Majmudar, one of the judges for this competition, called it a “sonically and symbolically” rich poem that investigates both “predatory sight and visionary insight” in the figure of owls at night.
Cox is from Kansas City, Missouri. He received an MAR from Yale Divinity School and an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Smartish Pace, Literary Matters, Commonweal, Christianity and Literature, and elsewhere.
Ryan Wilson won the second-place award for his personal and metaphysical sonnet “Gather Ye.” Wilson is the author of two collections of poetry and a collection of translations. He teaches creative writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and was, until recently, the editor-in-chief of Literary Matters. He earned an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded the Sankey Prize for Poetry. He also holds a master’s degree from Boston University, where he was awarded the Schmuel Traum Prize for Translation.
Both poems will be published in the October issue of First Things and will receive prizes of $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. Over 1,000 poems were submitted by 587 contestants. This was a blind competition, judged by Majmudar, myself, and First Things editor R. R. Reno.
The First Things Poetry Prize is an annual award for a formally accomplished poem of up to forty lines. The magazine has a longstanding commitment to poetry, having published some of the leading poets of the last thirty years in its pages, including Les Murray, Richard Wilbur, Rhina P. Espaillat, Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas, Christian Wiman, and many others. Grace Notes, an anthology of First Things poetry, was published in 2010, and an annual poetry reading was started in 2015. We are pleased to continue this commitment to the art of poetry with a new prize thanks to the generous support of the Tim & Judy Rudderow Foundation.
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