14 Apr Announcing the 2025 JBLC Poetry Fellow
We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 2025 Poetry Fellowship: Nabila Lovelace of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Their first book Sons of Achilles is available from YesYes Books. Lovelace will visit Buffalo this August for a writing residency and read at the August 30 Silo City Reading Series event.
“Lovelace’s poems sing of family with precision. This speaker keeps rather than disavows, and in the keeping must navigate the uneven terrain of given family. These poems mark the uneasy love that comes when we know and honor our whole selves while maintaining the connection with family that extends into the past and forward in time. I was most drawn to the finely wrought details, the intimate portraits, and the fullness of feeling that extends throughout this sample. —Donika Kelly, 2025 Judge
In addition to naming Lovelace as winner, five poets were recognized as finalists from the pool of over 190 applicants. The 2025 finalists are Kailah Figueroa, Casandra López, Sydney Mayes, L. Renée, and Rose Zinnia. Join us in celebrating these incredible poets!
2025 Poetry Fellowship Winner: Nabila Lovelace
Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens born poet, her people hail from Trinidad & Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, their debut book of poems, is out now through YesYes Books. You can currently find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa.
On Instagram: @nabilas_here
2025 Poetry Fellowship Finalists
photo credit: iman ādam
Kailah Figueroa is a rhetorical engineer, memory archivist, and part-time prose stylist. Her poetry is published/forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, Pigeon Pages, wildness, Torch Literary Arts, and Ploughshares. She has received support and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and Vermont Studio Center. She is finishing her final semester for her MFA in Poetry at Rutgers University-Newark.
Website: kailahfigueroa.com
On Instagram: @kailahfigueroa
Casandra López is a California Indian (Tongva/Luiseño/Cahuilla) and Chicana writer who has received support from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. She’s the author of the poetry collection Brother Bullet and has been selected for residencies with Storyknife, Hedgebrook, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her memoir-in-progress, A Few Notes on Grief, was granted a 2019 James W. Ray Venture Project Award. She teaches at UC San Diego.
Website: casandramlopez.com
On Instagram: @casandramlopez
Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. Inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year, her work can be found in The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner and Poets.org among other publications. In 2024 Mayes was a Finalist for the Furious Flower Prize and the Adrienne Rich Award. She currently serves as the Executive Editor of Nashville Review.
Website: sydneymayespoet.wordpress.com
On Instagram: @sydney_gabrielle_mayes
photo credit: Jeffrey Albright
L. Renée is a poet, story collector, and nonfiction writer. She won the National Association of Black Storytellers’ 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellowship, Library of Congress’ 2024 Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology, and the 2024 Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She was awarded The Arkansas International’s 2023 Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize, 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, and Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere
Website: lreneepoems.com
On Instagram: @lreneepoems
photo credit: Kate Sweeney
Rose Zinnia is a poet, novelist, essayist, teaching artist, editor, and designer. Born in Akron, Ohio, she is the author of Togethering (Ledge Mule Press, 2024), a chapbook of poetry & lyric essay. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Zinnia’s honors also include fellowships and residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Kinsey Institute. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Poetry, CV2, Black Warrior Review, Poem-A-Day, The Journal, Gulf Coast, and West Branch, among others. She holds an MFA from Indiana University, works at the LGBTQ+ journal and press Foglifter, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Website: rosezinnia.earth
On Instagram: @parareligiousmoss
The Just Buffalo Literary Center Poetry Fellowship seeks to advance the career of an individual poet as well as raising Buffalo’s visibility nationwide as a literary city. More information about the fellowship can be found here.