Wladyslaw Cieszynski English Fellowship for Verse

Wladyslaw Cieszynski Memorial Award-Verse: Eligible students will be entering their last year of study in the 2025-26 academic year (e.g. graduating by August 2026) and have a minimum 3.0 cumulative GPA. This contest is for previously published work: one poem of no more than two pages. Online and print publications are both acceptable. Submit a PDF copy of the journal cover or website’s front page, table of contents when one exists, and the published piece itself with the author’s name blacked out wherever it appears.

Submit a PDF file that uses no capital letters, no spaces, and no punctuation in the file name. (e.g., poemfrommyheart.pdf is an acceptable name. Poem_From_My_Heart.PDF is a file that may experience technical troubles during the upload.)
All entries are judged anonymously. DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR OTHER IDENTIFYING INFORMATION ON ANY OF YOUR UPLOADED FILES.

Judge’s Bio:
Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her poetry and prose appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University MFA program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rolex Foundation, W.S. Merwin Conservancy, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation and U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Award. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker. It also received the 2024 Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the 2025 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. FSG will also bring out her novel, The Awakenings, and a nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth.