It is our honor to announce the winner of the 12th Annual Coniston Prize: Bo Hee Moon. Here is what our illustrious judge had to say about Bo’s poems:
From a splendid group of finalists, I have selected Bo Hee Moon’s sequence of coherent, artful poems as the winner of the 2025 Coniston Prize. The poems integrate apparent autobiography—the speaker is a South Korean adoptee—with ekphrasis, South Korean folklore, and sense memories that span lifetimes. Merging scraps of information from arrival and departure records, images from myth, and her own memories and instincts, the speaker constructs a palpable origin story. I am moved by this speaker, who despite playing “a minor role in a saga / with an all-white cast,” teaches herself “how // to hold a pencil, a brush of bristles in the gloam,” and use them to write her way toward a lost country and the child she was. “I held a bottle // with two hands. I sucked / on my fingers. My eyes followed // objects on all planes.” These poems represent an impressive use of the lyric to reflect the shattered past, and even to arrange the parts into a tolerable whole.
—Diane Seuss, Contest Judge
Author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
We share Diane’s enthusiasm for Bo Hee Moon’s winning entry: It is simply exquisite. We would also like to highlight what makes this year’s five finalists worthy of recognition. Their manuscripts, selected from a pool of more than 700 submissions, each in their own way made us stop and listen. Women from all over the world submit to this prize, and these voices emerged as among the most urgent for their complexity, craft, and courage. Confronting both the private and social crises that shape our time, each of these poets maintains an individual voice while coming into quiet conversation with the other poets and artists assembled here.
In addition to our finalists, we have included seven poems we simply couldn’t resist. These poets welcomed us to the page, even when their stories were challenging. Every once in a while, we read a poem we can’t forget—and we’ve added these seven poems to that extraordinary list.
To hear Bo Hee Moon, JC Andrews, Callista Buchen, Jenna Rozelle, and Lisbeth White read their award-winning work, please join us for a live Zoom reading on October 20 at 7:00PM ET. Email radarpoetry@gmail.com to RSVP, and we will send you the link. Use the subject line “RSVP.”
—Rachel Marie Patterson and Dara-Lyn Shrager, Editors