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Gasher Book Award
The Gasher Book Award is open to any writer based in the United States, regardless of publication history. The winner will receive $1,000 + Publication and 20 free copies.
2025 Gasher Book Award
Final Judge
Melissa Kwasny
About this year's judge
Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Cloud Path (Milkweed Editions 2024), Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today, and Pictograph, as well as Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision. She is also the editor of two anthologies: I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Global Human Rights and Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. Her book of nonfiction, Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear, explores the cultural, labor, and environmental histories of clothing materials provided by animals. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Award and Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a work in progress, and a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She was Montana Poet Laureate from 2019-2021, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker.
2025 Winner
Angelo Mao
A White Horse Is Not a Horse
"Informed by a deep knowledge of anatomy, physics, and mathematics, a deft and startling play of language, and a restless experimentation in form, the poems in A White Horse Is Not a Horse dissect with almost unbearable precision our human ideas of culture and identity. Who are we? Who determines the answer? Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei's photographs Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 and dissident poet Emily Dickinson's lines 'Split the Lark--and you'll find the Music'—as well as Euripides' story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia—serve as reoccurring metaphors for what is lost and found when we exchange one form of life for another. 'Metaphor is a precise form of turbidity,' Mao writes: a smaller country subsumed into a larger one, a homeland left behind, a language adopted or abandoned, or suspended. Lyric and political, this is a remarkable book. I really haven't read anything quite like it." - Final Judge, Melissa Kwasny
Angelo Mao is a biomedical scientist and writer. He is the author of Abattoir (Burnside Review Press, 2021). His poetry has appeared in AGNI, The Drift, The Georgia Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in bioengineering from Harvard University and edits DIALOGIST, an online poetry journal.
Previous Winners
2024: Eliza Guerra, Holograms in the Field