81: 2026 Passager Poetry Contest
Soft cover | Forthcoming this September
I was an intern reporter for a local paper – so no such thing as “writers’ block” in that situation – you went out, covered a story, came back and started typing against the 11:30 pm deadline. But I left that life for a spiritual commune where individual art was not exactly encouraged – it was seen as “ego.” The horror . . . I still revise poems at readings before I’m introduced, just minor stuff but it makes the work more alive for me, newer.
rupert fike
2026 Passager poet
2026 Passager Poet
Rupert Fike
Honorable mentions
Gus Andres
Carry It Well
Joy Axelson
Dear Magnus & Renee
John Blair
The Diamonds on Neptune
Richard Brostoff
The Secret Life of a Vortex
Joyce Stevens Brown
The Poem Should be Simple and Strange
Ian Campbell
An Open Gladness
Phyllis Carito
Time
Sarah das Gupta
Glimpses of the River Hooghly
Pamela Dillon
All Souls Day
Mark Elber
Ode to the Alien Corn
Margaret Flaherty
Agreeing with Czeslaw Milosz
Elissa Glassgold
You are so far away
Beth Gordon
The Crone & AI
Beverly Greenspan
Art Work
Ruth Hoberman
When My Father Tried to Explain His Mother
Judith Hoyer
I’m Telling You
David Hummon
Dear Mrs. Magnusson
Terry S. Johnson
Sunrise on an Arctic Coastal City
Kathryn Jordan
Mommy, Mom, Mother
Diane Klammer
Warning: Glaciers Calving
Florence Ladd
In My Purse I Carry
Flavian Mark Lupinetti
Elegy for a West Virginia Strip Mine
Cathleen Micheaels
The Last Swim of the Season
Christie Nordhielm
Around Here
Steve Ormiston
Swaddled and Gone
James Penha
What I Won’t Be Talking About With Him
David J.S. Pickering
I Stood at Your Bedside in My Sober Afterlife
Steve Pollack
Rotterdam
Jerry Prater
The Kitchen
Jaque Reed
Ghost
Mary Lou Rife
The Artist’s Mother
Alma Rolfs
Loving Birds
Brook Sadler
[ ]
Dale Schellenger
Bullet
Allen Shadow
Pompadour
Emily Shearer
Roundel for My Son
Matthew J. Spireng
Sunday Breakfast
Annie Stenzel
Sonnet for when Ariadne holds my hand in the labyrinth at San Damiano
Lucinda Trew
Dom Perignon
Kenneth White
What Happened When Someone Told Sidney Bechet He’d Played the Wrong Chord
Marion Winik
Glose for Sleep and Waking
Sam Wright
Pandora’s Children
Nina Israel Zucker
Refugee in Suburbia
Executive Director & Design
Christine Drawl
Editor-in-Chief
Rosanne Singer
Senior editor
Mary Azrael
managing editor
Asher Ruck
media relations & podcast producer
Jon Shorr
guest readers
Shaheen Dil
Jenny Doughty
Karen Paul Holmes
Judy Ireland
Robert Miner
Gary Powell
Julie Cadwallader Staub
interns
Eleanor Yarbrough
cover painting
TBA
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