2025 ELYSE WOLF PRIZE, OFFERED BY SLATE ROOF PRESS

Congratulations to Louhi Pohjola, winner of the 2025 Elyse Wolf Prize/Slate Roof Press Annual Chapbook Contest!

We have the honor to announce the selection of Cracking Open the Bones, by Louhi Pohjola of Portland, OR, as the winner of our 2025 chapbook contest. Louhi becomes the newest member of Slate Roof Press and receives the $500 Elyse Wolf Prize and publication of her chapbook in an art-quality edition. This year we accepted manuscripts from poets nationwide.

Runner-up:

Caroline White is our runner-up for her manuscript Inventing Zero, and receives a $100 prize

Finalists:

Michael Hill, for Getting Saved

Richard Lyons for Second Life

Alexandra Risley Schroeder for Sea-Through Box

The following poets deserve honorable mention: Pamela Gemme for Making My Madonna, Ben Jacques for The Mediation of Dreams, Marci Johnson for Decoy Heron, Gabrielle Oliver for Of Kin and Kiln, Nnadi Samuel for I Begin with Noise, End with an Accent, Kashiana Singh for Vital Signs Absent and Wendell Hawken for Slinky.

We thank everyone who participated for their considerable time, work, and heart in preparing and submitting a manuscript. The selection process was difficult; we received many excellent manuscripts representing a broad spectrum of poetic styles and concerns, and each one was carefully considered. Our selection process was blind.

About the winning author and manuscript

What drew us to Cracking Open the Bones was its "speech musicked," the interplay of languages and voices, its current relevance, and the sweep of history beginning with the WWII Russian invasion of Finnish Karelia and resulting trauma cascading down through displaced people and generations.

Here is a sample poem from the manuscript:

Linnunrata: The Milky Way

Winter cracked open our bones
one by one and Baba Yaga sucked

out the marrow until we became
ghosts. Time slipped through

the fishing hole in the ice, a line onto
which moments attached like mussels

while the Linnunrata rotated above,
crushing us in its numinosity.

So low and heavy, our ghost breath
steamed like the hot rocks of the sauna

where we once threw the löyly carelessly,
a pouring-away in this world of no attachment.

The light on the packed snow reflected
back to that pathway of birds who flew

their lights away from Earth, away
from ghosts who pinned their hopes on stars.

(Previously appeared in SLANT: A Journal of Poetry)

Louhi Pohjola was born in Montreal, Canada, to Finnish immigrant parents, and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is the featured artist for 2025 in the Carl Jung Institute of Los Angeles publication, Psychological Perspectives, and is a Pushcart nominee. Her work has appeared or will be forthcoming in SLANT, Seisma, Arc, Kelp, Willawaw, InScribe, and The Ekphrastic Review, among other journals. Cracking Open the Bones was named a finalist in three chapbook competitions in 2024 prior to winning the 2025 Elyse Wolf Prize. Louhi's background has included teaching cell and molecular biology to medical students at Oregon Health and Sciences University, and later, teaching high school in southern Oregon. She is an avid fly-fisherwoman and river rock connoisseur.

For information about the Elyse Wolf Prize/Slate Roof Press Chapbook Award, click here for Candace Curren The Sound of Her Good Name, and here for Lynn Shorter Singer in the Gray of Jean-Michel.