To the poets who did not win: Do not be discouraged. It’s not you, it’s us!

For this year’s annual Foley Poetry Contest, my colleague Brigid McCabe and I scoured through nearly 700 poems, whittling them down to 25 and finally putting our heads together and choosing the winner and two runners-up.

If you submitted your poetry and you didn’t make it as a finalist, please be assured, it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the quality of the work. You could have written a sterling poem that might be accepted as a prize-winner in any given literary journal but didn’t quite fit a general-interest magazine. (And a religious magazine at that—though Foley poems don’t have to be overtly about religion or spirituality.) Or you could have submitted a marvelous poem that might win the prize in a general-interest religious magazine like America…just with a different pair of judges. They might be judges who found that the poem resonated with them in a way it didn’t with us, or who were more naturally drawn to the rhythms and material and wordsmithing and cleverness or lack of cleverness, or whatever it is that we were not drawn to.

Not to say it is all completely subjective, that the judging of literature is purely based on whim of circumstance, taste, personal history. Sometimes a work of literature is so obviously fantastic that any judge in any given year would take it. There is a reason they keep doing outdoor Shakespeare before sold-out audiences in pavilions and theaters all around the country year after year. The writing is just that good. Everyone loves it.

But outside of Shakespeare and his ilk, a lot of it is up for grabs. Publication is a numbers game. Read a ton, write a ton, revise a ton, solicit honest (but encouraging!) feedback, then send your work to as many places as you can. (Caveat: Make that places that you think could be a good fit for your work; it always surprises me when we receive any number of, uhhhh, “dirty” poems here at our genteel—yes? maybe?—religious magazine.)

If you want it enough and keep doing it enough, eventually you’ll get published.

(I offer this advice more for getting published in general than for winning contests. Writing poetry to win prizes or to get on someone’s top 10 list can be a maddening fool’s errand. You might end up trying to write poetry that sounds like the kind of poetry that wins prizes and gets on top 10 lists. And lose your own voice in the process. Write in your voice, and let the chips fall where they may.)

The winner of this year’s contest, whose singular voice captured our hearts, is “They tell us border nets, 10,000 feet high,” by Emily Davis-Fletcher of Roanoke, Va. The two runners-up, to be published in the July-August issue, are “At the end of my suffering there was a door,” by Jane Wageman of Roseville, Minn., and “The Novena That Carried Me,” by Asha Mirriam of Kampala, Uganda. (We typically choose three runners-up, but this year settled on only two.)

Thank you to all who took the risk of baring their hearts for us to read. Even if you did not get your poem published, please let us not be the only ones who hear these echoes of your soul. Read it out loud! To a willing listener, to your hedgehog. Read it into the rolling fog. The world wants your voice. No, really it does.

⸺

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of the new film “The Allegory.”

This article appears in June 2026.

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”