2025 High School Poetry Contest

We are excited to launch this year's High School Poetry Contest. 52 poems were selected for the 2025 High School Poetry Anthology. Click here for submission guidelines, information about this year's judge, and prizes.

About the Poetry Contest

The Marin Poetry Center sponsors teen-related projects that celebrate the arts through our High School Poetry Contest, which provides students with professional review, selection, and publishing via our High School Poetry Anthology. Also, students selected for the anthology are invited to read their work at our Launch Reading in the spring of each year and receive a free anthology copy. For many students, inclusion in our anthology is their first experience writing and/or publishing a poem.  In the process, students tap into a special part of themselves and learn the power of their unique voice. Thank you for supporting the MPC High School Poetry Contest.

A note from MPC High School Anthology Editor, Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş

The Marin Poetry Center is thrilled to announce the winners and honorable mentions of the 2025 High School Anthology Contest! To follow the past few years, we opened our contest to Bay Area counties beyond Marin. Semifinalists were selected by a panel of experienced poets and our final judge, Thomas Dunn, selected the finalists. Book design by Lisa Rappoport & cover art by Gabrielle Beyer.

For this year’s anthology, we asked students to write on the themes of resistance, hope, identity, in solidarity with all immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees worldwide who are seeking safety, life, and liberation. There is no hiding the evil empire, there are no more disguises left to fool the young poets, and there is no hiding that most of us do not feel like citizens of this land anymore — some with a choice, others without. To those who have erased our language and our rights, our forests of respite, our raging oceans, our windy moors of free ideas, you cannot hide. To those who fear your words will recede, become farther and farther between, recognize that you have the power to act, to tend to this tired soil, to help grow what has remained underground for decades. You are not alone. 

2025 WINNERS

1 ^st Place: Cartography of Becoming: – Angela Li, Basis Independent Silicon Valley
2 ^nd Place: cause of atheism for a trans boy – Robin Kraft, Marin School of the Arts
3 ^rd  Place:  Utopia –  Vera Woo, The Branson School

HONORABLE MENTIONS

American Dreams – Isabel Shen, Head-Royce School
all american wonderland –  Sophia DeMoe, Marin School of the Arts

47 additional poems have been selected for inclusion in the anthology, which launched on May 28, 2025.

The best way to order anthologies is online. Please note that $4.20 will be automatically added to your order to cover shipping and handling costs for the first book and an additional $1.50 for each additional book. Contact highschool@marinpoetrycenter.org with any questions.

Order, 2025 $20

Order, 2024 $18

Order, 2023 $18