Out of over 100 different poets and almost 400 poems submitted, “My Stillborn Son, the Moon” by Karen Sherk Chio is this year’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize winner. Final judge Joseph Bathanti described his selection for the Prize, “There’s a stunning contemplative hush that permeates ‘My Stillborn Son, the Moon’ and the unforgettable moment at the poem’s closure.” He describes the prize winner as “a poem of epiphany and lyric ethereal intensity.” The poet will receive a $250 prize, a Pushcart nomination, and publication in the 2026 print issue of the North Carolina Literary Review.
Karen Sherk Chio was born in Charlotte, NC, where she lived her first four years, and she currently lives in Massachusetts. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans, where she was the winner of the 2025 Andrea Saunders Gereighty/ Academy of American Poets Award, the 2025 Maxine and Joseph Cassin Prize for Poetry Thesis, and the 2023 Vassar Miller Poetry Award. She is an associate poetry editor for the Charlotte-based West Trade Review, a full-time public health worker, a parent, and a spouse. Her creative work has appeared in CALYX, swamp pink, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and her critical work has been published by Colorado Review. Chio holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Public Health from Boston University.
Bathanti awarded 2nd place to Roxanne Henderson, remarking that her “‘Reflections on the Ecosystem’ is a wildly imaginative and stylistically elegant poem that is ultimately a powerfully timely cautionary tale. A poem thoroughly rooted in witness, and wonderfully obsessive documentary precision, it’s also cannily leavened with unexpected flourishes of humor.” Henderson is a twelfth-generation North Carolinian who also grew up internationally in a military family. She is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where she still resides; she received two poetry prizes as an undergraduate and graduated with honors in creative writing.
Bathanti’s selection for 3rd place is a poem by Elisabeth Corley, about which he notes, “‘Arc Light’ is a foreboding, beautiful poem that has that detached haunted voice of speakers in James Dickey’s war poems; as well as the often spare, but incendiary, poems by Brian Turner, in Here, Bullet, that seem to issue from the haunted realm of dream.” Corley’s poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Hyperion, Carolina Quarterly, Feminist Studies, New Haven Review, Cold Mountain Review, and others. She lives near Pittsboro, holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a BA with Highest Honors in Poetry from UNC Chapel Hill. Corley was awarded a 2018 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry.
Honorable Mention goes to J.S. Absher for “Mystic Neighborhood,” which Bathanti describes as “a narrative rooted deeply in the unfathomable mystery of the natural world. Rife with gorgeous imagery and intriguing obsessive attention to detail, it possesses a sonic integrity that thrums in one’s head and heart long after this fine poem concludes.” In addition to many poems published over the years in NCLR, Absher has published two full-length books of poetry, Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022) and Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press, 2016), and he was awarded the Lena Shull Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society in 2015. Absher’s poems have won prizes from BYU Studies Quarterly and Dialogue and have recently been published by NCLR, The McNeese Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, New Verse Review, and Tar River Review. He lives in Raleigh with his wife, Patti.
Other finalists were Joan Barasovska from Chapel Hill for “A Poem About Us Composed of Clichés part 2”; Michael Beadle from Raleigh for “Vanitas”; Terry Cawley from Charlotte for “The Art of War”; Zachariah Claypole-White from Chapel Hill for “what i remember most from church”; Asma Olajuwon from Charlotte for “At Midnight”; Ilari Pass from Greensboro for “Ghazal for the Jinn“; Veronica Schorr from Browns Summit for “The Summer I Left”; Martin Settle from Charlotte for “Ode to Mockingbird”; and Jane Shlensky from Bahama for “Be Still and Know.” These poems will appear in NCLR Online in 2026.
We thank our NCLR poetry readers and Poetry Editor, Jeff Franklin, for all their hard work to choose finalists. Thanks, too, to final judge, Joseph Bathanti, who is author of nineteen books, and is one of the editors of The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry (UNC Press, 2024). He was Poet Laureate of North Carolina 2012–2014 and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2024.
This is the fourteenth year for the Applewhite Poetry Prize Contest, which is open to any NC poet who is a subscriber to NCLR or a member of the NC Literary and Historical Association. Honoraria for the prize winner, honoree, judge, and any other poets whose poems are accepted for publication are provided by the NCLHA and a grant from the NC Arts Council.
Produced since 1992 at East Carolina University and published by the University of North Carolina Press, the mission of NCLR is to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture. NCLR introduces new and emerging writers; reintroduces forgotten authors; showcases work in literary criticism, interviews, book reviews, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; and reports on literary news stories. We complement the writing with the work of North Carolina artists and photographers.
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