2025 English Student Poetry Contest Winners

KENNESAW, Ga. (Apr 11, 2025) — In honor of National Poetry Month, we're proud to feature the winners of this year's KSU English Student Poetry Contest! Four poems from current KSU English students were selected by a review team of department poets. Many thanks to all who submitted their work for consideration, and a special thanks to this year's review team from The Headlight Review, Waymark, and the Writing Center's "For Better Or For Verse" poetry club!

First Place: "Traveler" by Christine Sharper

Christine Sharper is a Kennesaw State University sophomore majoring in Interactive Design and minoring in Professional Writing. She is a member of KSU's poetry club For Better Or For Verse, and enjoys writing flash fiction and nonfiction as well.

 

Second Place: "Logan" by Ryne Willever

Ryne Willever is a sophomore at Kennesaw State University. Ryne is majoring in Media and Entertainment with a minor in Professional Writing. He's an active member at Kennesaw State's club For Film Sake, in which he's been an art director and production assistant for some of the club's short films. Ryne enjoys writing poetry, nonfiction, and screenplays.

 

Third Place: "Fingernails" by Dominik Perez

Dominik Perez is one part redneck and one part Colombian. He grew up all over Georgia and wishes his family had taught him Spanish. His favorite delusion is that he is a good writer, believing wholeheartedly that comic books and poetry are his fortes.

 

Honorable Mention: "I Lost My Memory" by Islah Rahmaan

Islah Rahmaan, 24, is a graduate student in the MAPW program with a concentration in Creative Writing and support area in Composition and Rhetoric. She enjoys writing poetry, creative writing, and hopes to teach in the future. Her inspirations include Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.

 

  • Roundish, good-natured hills
    give way to planes of yellow grass
    and grass gives way
    to towering glass buildings,
    tall metallic pricks against the blue sky
    that are like marks on a map –
    hatchings of a city’s border and what lies within.

    The charcoal-colored streets
    are somehow rougher
    than the dirt and gravel roads
    from whence this traveler came.
    The streetlights are like smaller suns
    tethered to the earth,
    windows twinkle strange reflections
    like dark lake water.

     

  • Later afternoons in skin-tight jorts that cling to my hipbone—leg hair caressing the cold metal trunk of a gray manual Honda Civic—sun bursting into my love-struck mocha eyes. Leather-tanned skin belonging to a chain smoker—Aviators pushing back matte black hair—reflecting my bleached dyed buzzcut. The breeze carries spring - swaying against Jesus Christ on a plastic sign—crumbs of donuts lost in a paper bag left in the passenger seat. Two lovers trespassing St. Mary’s Orthodox church—legs wrapped around the torso of a birdman—my head resting on his striped cotton tee. Snapped twigs behind a shoe shed—broken down lawnmower waiting to start again—my gray flannel breaking my fall. His boss called again, fragmented banter from his lips—I’m ignoring my mother's plead to return home. Breathing in his nuclear flumes—aftershave mixed with the sweat of a blue-collar man—I breathe and count to three. Something tells me he’s acting quite obscene—fingers tracking the stretch marks lacing my spine—hair standing on edge. Calluses on his hands from rough nights—bruises on my thighs from tough sleep—bitter-sweet kisses linger between my fingers.

    A soaring plane above shifted my attention. “Every time I see a plane, I think it's you,” fell out of my lips. And then I turned back to catch his glance again. It’s gone. He’s gone, now he's lost in the sky for the rest of my life.

  •  

    All these people in my living room
    Dressed in black
    Top

    Bottom

    Look to me with glassy eyes and
    Pasted smiles
    White teeth chewing on ice

    I'm chewing on fingernails off my fingers
    Never on
    What is it they want me to say?
    I can't speak round a mouthful

    Spit them out in the sink and they'll wait

    Everyone is kind
    Everyone is patient

    Try not to choke as they scratch your throat
    Floss your teeth
    And prick your gums like needles

    It's time to drive again,
    Leave them all behind
    Nice folks better spent wasting someone else's time.

    Those fingernails keep spewing from my bloody lips

    This suit will need dry cleaning

    Now she's in my head again
    Perfect, beautiful
    Tempting as we take a wild curve around
    Nothing but a stop sign

    Will I spin out? Go wild
    Like we were all doing back then?
    Will the black suits come back
    And it's my turn for them

    What will the men think of me
    With their flashing read lights
    When they find a corpse filled with fingernails
    Rotting in the night.

  • I Lost My Memory.

     

    On July 9, 1937, a storage building rented by the Fox Film Corporation in Little Ferry, New Jersey exploded, shooting flames higher than 100 feet into the air. The fire destroyed 42 individual vaults containing the majority of the silent films produced by Fox.

     

    memories play in the back of my mind like cinema on screen.
    scratchy tape, cutting the scene, press record, then delete, and record it over again.
    play it in color, then fade it out, fade it back in, and make it black and white.

    “this one is dramatic. this one is comedic. this one is romantic. this one is —“
    I forgot the script, I forgot the scene, I forgot my part.
    what’s my line again?

    somewhere in the back of my mind, curtains close.

    burning the studio now, I fell asleep smoking again,
    burning the studio now, I left a candle on,
    burning the studio now, I hated that film anyway.

    like July 9th of 1937,
    the majority lost to the fire.

    the film is gone now.

 

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