​2025 winning manuscript selected by 
STACEY WAITE

Stacey Waite is a poet, activist, educator, and scholar who conducts research in the field of composition and the teaching of writing as well. Originally, from Long Island, New York, Stacey received a Master of Fine Arts in writing in 2002 and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011. Waite is now Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Waite has published four collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize in Poetry), Love Poem to Androgyny (winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition), the lake has no saint (winner of the 2008 Snowbound Prize in Poetry) and Butch Geography (Tupelo Press, 2013).  Waite’s most recent scholarly book, Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing, was published with the University of Pittsburgh Press in May of 2017. Waite’s books are taught at over seventy colleges and universities in Composition/Rhetoric, Creative Writing and Gender Studies programs each year.  Individual poems have been published most recently in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Marlboro Review, Gulf Stream, Black Warrior Review and Court Green. Waite has also offered workshops and diversity trainings in gender multiplicity and support for queer youth in local high schools and colleges in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Nebraska, South Dakota, Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio.  Waite’s work has been reviewed by many major publications including the Lambda Literary Foundation, New Pages, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.