In honor of Edna St. Vincent Millay and her legacy as a groundbreaking poet in so many ways, including being the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Millay House Rockland announces the winners of the inaugural Vincent Poetry Prize. 

The winner, Isabel Neal, is the author of Thrown Voice, which won the 2025 Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by Rae Armantrout, according to a Millay House Rockland news release. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere.

“It was wonderful to see poets recognizing and working with so many aspects of Millay,” said Judge Julia Bouwsma, Maine State Poet Laureate 2021-2026, in a Millay House Rockland news release. 

Join Millay House on Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 7 p.m., via Zoom, for a celebratory reading with the winners of the inaugural Vincent Poetry Prize.

Hosted by Millay House Rockland Board member Jefferson Navicky, the reading will include:

● Julia Bouwsma, Judge

● Isabel Neal, Winner

● Luisa A. Igloria, Editor’s Choice Award

● Honorable Mentions: Judy Kaber, Nicole Pomeroy, and Joyce Schmid.

Julia Bouwsma was Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate (term 2021- 2026) and lives off-the-grid in the mountains of Western Maine where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. She is the author of three poetry collections: Death Fluorescence, Midden, and Work by Bloodlight.

Winner of Editor’s Choice is Luisa A. Igloria, author of Caulbearer and 14 other books. She is the Eminent Scholar and Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. Igloria is the 20th Poet Laureate of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita. In 2021, the Academy of American Poets awarded her a Poet Laureate Fellowship.

For more information regarding the three Honorable Mention poets, please visit the Millay House Rockland website.

All five poets will be published in the summer edition of the literary magazine The Third Fig Review which will be available soon on the website www.millayhouserockland.org.

Admission is free. In-person and virtual registration can be found at MillayHouseRockland.org/events.

About Millay House Rockland: The birthplace of Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay has been preserved and restored by the Millay House Rockland board whose mission is to further poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s legacy by supporting writers, nurturing literary learning, and cultivating community in Midcoast Maine.