Congratulations to the finalists of our 2026 SASFest Poetry Contest. Winner and Runners-Up marked below.

Finalists are pictured below alphabetically from the top, left to right, and their bios are below.

HONORABLE MENTION: Andy Barrow is a New York–based writer whose forthcoming novel, Peter in Progress, draws inspiration from his own later-in-life gay awakening. When he’s not writing, Andy is likely perfecting his backhand, chasing his next cold brew, or making up for lost time on the dance floor. Find him at @andy_barrow_books and www.andybarrowbooks.com. 

Amberlee Clark is an actor, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Born in Texas, she traveled to LA to study at AMDA College and Conservatory, where she received her BFA in Acting. In addition to her day job working with kids, Amberlee has worked with several small theatre companies around LA, and she served on the Artistic Management Committee at Theatre of NOTE. Amberlee is also the creator of NOTE Slam, a spoken word poetry event that highlights LA poets and works to unite the worlds of theater and spoken word. Follow Amberlee on Instagram @suddenlysherlock.

John Del Peschio’s work has appeared in Arlington Literary Journal, Lodestar Quarterly, modern words, Right Hand Pointing and elsewhere. His poem “Fifi the dangerous fag dog” opens the anthology Homo Pup (Cleis Press).  John has read at Brooklyn Poets, Dixon Place, the Ear Inn, MoMA, the New School, and other venues.  He attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a Contributor in Poetry and has studied in workshops and master classes with Mark Doty, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Burt, Elaine Equi and Kathleen Ossip. Del Peschio lives in Brooklyn. 

Jay Délise (they/them) (official jester of Sugar Hill) is a writer, performance artist, and eater of grapes, based in Harlem, New York. They have performed at The United Nations, The Schomburg Center, Judson Church, The Pulitzer Center, and Roundhouse. Their work has been featured in publications including Glass Poetry Press, Huffington Post, Lucky Jefferson, and AFROPUNK, among others. Jay has been a teacher and clown consultant/director for almost a decade, and their work smells of mischief, church giggles, and being barefoot on unfinished hardwood floors. They enjoy stealing from white people, bad wigs, being gay, fart jokes, jazz music, free art, assuming their mother/father wounds are undetectable and writing poems about them anyway.

RUNNER-UP: Kit Evans is a nonbinary poet and writer, born and raised in Oregon. They received their MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Their poetry has appeared in THRUSH, Variant Lit, Hiram Poetry Review, Vagabond City Lit, and others. In 2025 they were a finalist in the Saints and Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival’s Poetry Contest, and they’ve been nominated for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards. They live in Albany, Oregon, and serve as a copyeditor for Raleigh Review. 

Mae Gesser is a seventeen-year-old New Yorker. She enjoys biking and reading poetry, especially Shel Silverstein.

WINNER: Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning journalist, essayist, novelist, poet, and the New York Times bestselling author of five books. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, DIAGRAM, and others. Her books have been translated into more than 50 languages. She is the creator of the bestselling Substack “Going Solo at the End of the World” and co-founder of the Caravan Writers Collective. Her sixth book, Solo, is forthcoming from Hachette/Cardinal in 2027. She is completing a collection of poetry and her next nonfiction book.

Aspirant stay-at-home socialite & erstwhile libertine, Bosch Jones (J. Paul  Heiner) holds a BA in English Literature & Studio Art from Oberlin College, and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Bosch’s poems appear in The Paris Review, La Presa, South Florida Poetry Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, IMPACT magazine, Blood and Tears: Poems for Mathew Shepard, & the anthology Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing from Blue Room Collective. 

Deborah Ketai (she/her) writes from the intersection of bipolarity, bisexuality, and creative self-doubt, leavened with humor and wordplay. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Think, and many other journals. Her chapbook, “A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst,” won the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize and is forthcoming from the ironically titled Citizens for Decent Literature Press, part of The Literary Underground. Deborah and her wife live in Connecticut’s Naugatuck River Valley.

Blair Law (they/them) is a writer of poetry, short stories, and screenplays. They are the author of three poems in Antigravity Magazine, Spectrum, and The Broken Spine. They are currently a senior undergraduate student at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where they study English writing.

Jude Marx (they/them) was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico and now resides in southern Maine. They have written poetry since they were seven years old, later competing nationally on Albuquerque’s city-wide youth slam poetry team. Jude teaches at The Telling Room, a nonprofit that teaches and publishes creative writing by young people across Maine. Jude is the winner of the 2024 Maine Trans Poetry Anthology Contest and a 2025 Maine Literary Award for poetry. Their poems appear or are forthcoming in New Words Press, Monster Beauties: A Maine Transgender Poetry Anthology, The Stonecoast Review, and Neon & Smoke. 

RUNNER-UP: Peter McLaughlin is a trans man living in Brooklyn. In addition to writing poetry, he enjoys shooting film photography while walking in his neighborhood. His work has previously been published in Voicemail Poems. 

Maria Ingrande Mora (they/she) is the acclaimed author of Fragile Remedy, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection; Ranger Academy, a queer Power Rangers comic series; The Immeasurable Depth of You, Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award finalist, which earned three starred reviews; and A Wild Radiance, which earned a starred review with Kirkus calling it a “fast-paced, romantic, abundantly queer historical fantasy.” A graduate of the University of Florida, where they studied English with a concentration in poetry, Mora lives in St. Petersburg with three cats and two teenagers. 

Les Patin is a strategist and writer from New Orleans, Louisiana. His poem, “Last Requests/A Good Day for Ghost Stories,” was a finalist in the 2024 Patty Friedmann Prize. His poems often explore the gay experience, existentialism, and grief. Les is passionate about coastal restoration, the natural world, and the future of South Louisiana. 

David J.S. Pickering is a native Oregonian, having grown up and lived much of his life in the working-class culture of the North Oregon Coast. His first poetry collection, Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland, received the Airlie Prize in 2020. His poetry may be found in a variety of journals including Cirque, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Passager, and Tar River Poetry, among others. David lives with his husband in Portland Oregon where, even as you read this, he has likely had too much coffee.

Casey Gabriella Ramos is an artist, poet, and video game narrative designer from Jamaica, Queens, New York. Raised in a Brazilian and Filipino household of thirteen, Casey’s work as an artist often materializes with identity and community at the forefront. Casey previously worked at Xbox Game Studios Publishing as a Narrative Director and at Gameheads Oakland, a tech mentorship for low-income youth of color in the Bay Area as a mentor & instructor. Currently unemployed, Casey is pursuing art full-time while living in Montreal, Quebec. 

Liza Rose is a poet from rural Pennsylvania now living in New York City with her barn-born orange cat, Chai Honey. She received her MFA from NYU’s creative writing program in the spring. Her work has been published by Academy of American Poets, Soft Union, Mantis, Jabberwock Review, Vernacular, among others. She loves insects, horror, being alive, and much more. She is forever curious about everything.

Jackson D Smith is from the traditional homeland of the Occeneechi, Eno, and Shakori in Orange County, North Carolina. Community witches say that all the quartz in the soil makes locals more compassionate and gives them supernatural insight. A heart transplant recipient, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, at 30 to be on his partner’s insurance. After emerging from a long depression, he earned an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, where he later taught. Jackson is currently working on a novelization of his early life and later supernatural experiences in the months leading up to his transplant.

Emily Van Kley is a queer poet and circus artist currently based in Olympia, Washington. Her poetry collections are The Cold and the Rust (2018), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and Arrhythmia (2022), both from Persea Books. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and Best New Poets, and has received the Loraine Williams Prize for Poetry, the Iowa Review Award, and the Florida Review Editor’s Award among other honors. When not writing, Emily can often be found teaching or performing aerial acrobatics.

Glen Vecchione is the author of science, math, and history books that have been translated into several languages and distributed throughout the world. His poetry appears in Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, Tar River Review, Comstock Review, and Timberline Review. His new work, including a chapbook, is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, Finishing Line Press, and Rebel Satori. Writing under the pen name Glen Peters, his first novel, Where the Nights Smell Like Bread, was published by Rattling Good Yarns Press in April 2024. Glen currently divides his time between Palm Desert California, and Umbria, Italy. 

Holly Lyn Walrath is a writer, editor, and poet. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Analog, and Flash Fiction Online. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Glimmerglass Girl (2018), Numinose Lapidi (2020), and The Smallest of Bones (2021). She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. 

Birch Wiley is a transsexual poet living in New York. Their work can be found in Pleiades, Voicemail Poems, and Querencia Quarterly, among others. Their debut collection, Mythweaver, was published by new words {press}. You can learn more about them at birchwiley.com.

 

SASFest is grateful to:

Publisher – Rebel Satori Press

John Burton Harter Foundation

Saints & Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival is a program of the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. Visit sasfest.org for more information about our annual event.