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2025 Winner: Hanna Han, Mom, You Once Spoke of a River

Mom, You Once Spoke of a River by Hanna Han has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award.

Judge’s Comments: “From the opening lines of Hanna Han’s title poem, ‘Mom, You Once Spoke of a River’ I knew I was hearing a unique voice, at once lyrical, and emotionally profound, dense with meaning, as in ‘If you catch my tears, / you’ll find them heavy — / like the water you lifted / from the well at dawn, / your shadow drawn long on the red earth.’ Han’s beautifully wrought images carry the reader down her river of memory and loss, family history, the trials between immigrant mother and daughter, always with a touch of tenderness and mystery, a sense of bittersweet love overarching all of it.”
—Thomas A. Thomas, author of My Heart Is Not Asleep

Thank you to all who submitted. We appreciate the privilege of reading your fine work. Every poem is a love letter to the reader, even poems of grief and longing, perhaps especially those.

Runner Up

The New After by Tina Rapp

Judge’s remarks: Tina Rapp’s memoir-in-poems deftly takes us on a difficult journey of the heart, from the accident that fractured both her husband’s and her own life, through the years to his tragic death, leaving her alone, standing in the spring bloom of American Chestnut trees, “cross-bred / to resist near-certain affliction.”
—Thomas A. Thomas, author of My Heart Is Not Asleep

2024 Finalists (alphabetical by poet’s last name)

Honorable Mention