The 2025 William Matthews Poetry Prize Winners, selected by Nickole Brown

The editors of Asheville Poetry Review are pleased to announce the WILLIAM MATTHEWS POETRY PRIZE RECIPIENTS for 2025.

Emily W. Pease, from Williamburg, VA, is awarded first prize for her poem, “Lone Pony on the Last Farm in the City,” and will receive $1000, plus publication in The Asheville Poetry Review (Vol. 32, Issue 34, 2025), which will be released in December 2025.

Second prize is awarded to Stephen Kampa, from Elkton, FL, for his poem, “The Big One.” He will receive $250, as well as publication.

Amy Fleury resides in Eau Claire, WI. She is the third prize recipient for her poem “Spellwork For A Preemie,” and she will also be published in our next issue.

Emily W. Pease is a poet and fiction writer. Her short stories appear in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review (Editor’s Prize in Fiction, 1999), Shenandoah (Bevel Summers Prize, 2014), The Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review online, Narrative (top five story of the week, 2017), Witness, and elsewhere. Her collection, Let Me Out Here, won the inaugural C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Award at Hub City Press in 2018, judged by Lee K. Abbott. Her poems appear in The Florida Review, Juniper, One, Litmosphere, and Rattle (Ekphrastic Challenge winner, June, 2021). She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference. She lives in Williamsburg, VA, where she taught writing for many years at William & Mary.

Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (2011), Bachelor Pad (2014), Articulate as Rain (2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (2023). His work has appeared in The Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. He was also included in Best American Poetry 2018, Best American Poetry 2024, and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (2020). During the spring of 2021, he was the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House. He teaches at Flagler College.

Amy Fleury is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Beautiful Trouble, and Sympathetic Magic, both from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry at Southern Illinois University Press, and a chapbook, Reliquaries of the Lesser Saints (RopeWalk Press). Recent poems have been published in 32 Poems, Image, swamp pink, and other journals and have been awarded the Mary C. Mohr Prize from Southern Indiana Review and the 2024 Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry. She has held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Amy Clampitt House and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She lives and teaches in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.