Announcing the 2025 Homebound Poetry Prize Winners

Recognizing manuscripts that dare

Nov 12, 2025

Friends of Wayfarer,

For almost fifteen years, the Homebound Poetry Prize has recognized exceptional voices in contemporary poetry. Each winning collection represents a bold, lyrical exploration of language, identity, and the human experience. Today, we’re thrilled to share the results of the 2025 Prize. Thank you to every poet who sent their work our way this year. We were humbled by the range and ferocity of the manuscripts we read.

Winner(s) — We Have a Tie!

Council of Thunder by Geneva Toland

Council of Thunder is a free-fall into what it takes to love this toxified, crumbling, stunning world. Exploring themes of eco-feminism, ecological kinship, heartbreak as initiation, and radical collective love, this collection asks readers to look at the ugly, the painful, the hurtful, and love this world, “out of all worlds,” anyway. A coming-of-age in the times of climate chaos and political dysfunction, Council of Thunder seeks council from the more-than-human beings on how to more boldly and interdependently love ourselves, this world, and each other.

Here We Were Happy by Cooper Young

Here We Were Happy is a travel-rooted poetry collection devoted to the “Poetry of Place.” After discovering a map of one of Matsuo Bashō’s wandering routes, the poet retraced that path through Japan, keeping a travel journal that grew into this book. Influenced by Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, W. S. Merwin, and the poet’s father, Gary Young, the poems follow journeys across Japan, Thailand, Hawaii, and beyond, gathering stories heard, meals tasted, and landscapes encountered into a vivid record of movement and memory.

Both manuscripts stunned our editorial team in distinct ways, and in the end we chose to honor them equally. We’ll be extending publication contracts to both authors. Stay tuned for cover reveals, pre-order dates, and launch events.

Finalist

Wild Mother by Marianne Sundquist

Honorable Mentions

Endangered Relations by Dee Horne

Notes from a Boat by Frederic Stott

The Sweetest Decline by Vincent Rendoni

Stone Math by Mike Bove

My Own Natural History by Celia Meade

Lex, Your Poetry’s Grotesque by Alexis Rhodes

About the Prize

The Homebound Poetry Prize recognizes full-length, unpublished poetry manuscripts that carry a fearless, lyrical vision. The winning collection(s) will be published by Wayfarer Books in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats and distributed globally via Ingram.

If you’re a bookseller, reviewer, or event organizer and you’d like early information or galleys as they become available, please reach out: pr@wayfarerbooks.org.

Thank you to everyone who submitted!

With gratitude

Connor

Mx. Connor Wolfe (they/them)

Founder, Wayfarer Books & Wayfarer Magazine
Where the Wild and the Marginal Speak