Announcing the 2025 Adroit Prizes for Poetry and Prose Results!

The editors of The Adroit Journal are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2025 Adroit Prizes for Poetry & Prose.

The Adroit Prizes are awarded annually to two students of secondary or undergraduate status. We’re fortunate to receive exceptional work from emerging writers in high school and college, and the best of the best will be recognized by the Adroit Prizes.

The 2025 Adroit Prize for Poetry was judged by Danez Smith, while the 2025 Adroit Prize for Prose was judged by Aria Aber.

Danez Smith (Poetry) is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Aria Aber (Prose) was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her first novel GOOD GIRL is was published from Hogarth (US) in 2024 and Bloomsbury (UK) in 2025, and will be translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Japanese. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She serves as the poetry editor of Amulet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.

2025 Adroit Prize Winners:

Nikhe Braimah is a Nigerian-American poet based in New York City and originally hailing from the Bay Area. He is a graduate of Yale University and his work has previously been featured in Yale Literary Magazine.

Annie Zhu is a writer from Texas. Her work has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, The Words Faire, and more. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and serves on the editorial team at E&GJ Press. When not writing, she enjoys baking ambitious desserts and playing the cello.

2025 Adroit Prize Runners-Up:

(An Adroit Prizes first! Both Danez & Aria selected Eliza Gilbert as a runner-up!)

2025 Adroit Prize Finalists:

2025 Adroit Prize Semifinalists:

2025 Adroit Prize Commended Writers:

Stay tuned for next year’s Adroit Prizes, which will open in early spring 2026! Click here sign up for updates!

Peter LaBerge

Peter LaBerge founded The Adroit Journal in 2010, as a high school sophomore. His work appears in Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, and Tin House, among others. He is the recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize.

Peter LaBerge

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