Congratulations to this year’s winners of the Hope College Academy of American Poets (AAP) Prize! First place was awarded to AnnaLeah Lacoss, and honorable mention to Candace Williams and Elsa Kim. This year 51worthy poems were submitted for the 2025 Hope College Academy of American Poets University and College Prize. Thank you to all who shared their creative work with us!
About the Prize
The Hope College Academy of American Poets (AAP) Prize award is funded by the University and College Poetry Prize program of the AAP. The academy began the program in 1955 at 10 schools, and now sponsors nearly 200 annual prizes for poetry at colleges and universities nationwide. Poets honored through the program have included Mark Doty, Louise Gluck, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Charles Wright. An award check in the amount of $100 will go to the winner, as well as a one-year membership to the Academy of American Poets, and a subscription to the magazine American Poets.
This year’s judge, Sun Yung Shin, was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. She is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and elsewhere. She is a former MacDowell fellow and has received grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.
Sun Yung Shin is also the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2021) and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections The Wet Hex (winner of the Midland Authors Society Award for Poetry and finalist for a Minnesota Book Award) Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson and picture book Where We Come From, co-written with Diane Wilson, Shannon Gibney, and John Coy. Her forthcoming picture book, Revolutions are Made of Love: Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, co-written with Mélina Mangal, will be published in 2025.
1st Prize Winner: AnnaLeah Lacoss
Sun Yung Shin wrote: I chose “God as a vending machine” as the winner because I was surprised in every line, and I like a poem that has an argument but holds onto it lightly, and entertains its opposite, and thereby creates a dialectic energy for the reader, like a Shakespearean monologue in which passion presents its visceral compulsion and reason presents its cool analysis. The slashes / internal line breaks / caesuras communicate a kind of disjointedness that to me brings to mind the slow mechanisms of a vending machine, the conveyor-ish movement and the use of gravity to deliver the purchased item, which drops clunkily into the tray. Thinking about a god as a kind of analog giving machine (or not) makes me think of carnivals, automata, and the uncanny valley.”
Honorable Mention: Candace Williams and Elsa Kim
Sun Yung Shin wrote: “I chose “The Hunter of Stars” as an honorable mention because it is hard to write a poem about a grandmother without leaning on sentiment. I found the grandmother’s advice intriguing and the play on words in “planes” to be quirky and intriguing. I also appreciate the rather abrupt intrusion of the mother, because I wasn’t expecting it, and then what she goes on to say is so unrelated to palm reading it brought in a lot of energy. It also wasn’t predictable based on her characterization as a “revolutionary.” Also, the line “This is how I tied the hind legs of fate” is both haunting and wonderfully rhythmic. I also enjoyed the other striking images as well as the deft use of sound to create unity in a poem that ping pongs around space and time.”
Sun Yun Shin wrote: “I chose “How to Peel an Orange as if You are God” as an honorable mention because of the attention lavished on the details of deconstruction of an orange, which has been written about a good deal, especially as a thing of sunlight. But this poem took its time undressing the orange, which the orange resists. It requires labor and commitment to dismantle an orange by hand, and a god would have all the time in the world to make it into a kind of ceremony. I also enjoyed the surprising language and images, “sallow,” “poppy-petal,” “yellow skies,” “thick white rope.” It was intriguing to think about a god undressing and disemboweling an orange as a proxy (rehearsal?) for a kind of fraternal exorcism. I like how this poem is unapologetically theatrical and yet its stately tercets create an inexorable march toward disintegration.”