Angela Kirby of Raleigh, North Carolina has won the 2025 Cider Press Review Book Award with the manuscript, Pareidolia. Runner-up was Rhizomes and Bones by Annette Sisson. Additional finalists (in alphabetical order) include Doctrine of the Kite by Melody Wilson, Felt Stars by Emily Kedar, Hunger Mother by Mary Moore, and Salt and Ambrosia by Jennifer Louvet.
Final Judge Consuelo Wise writes, “Pareidolia speaks from a wintered after-world where domestic assault no longer threatens. And yet still in transit, memories make contact. These are poems of retribution, recall, relief. A new kind of pastoral.”
Angela Kirby earned a BA in Creative Writing from Duke University. She is a 2024 Atlanta Journal International Poetry Merit Awardee, 2022 Second Prize Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and two-time winner of the Anne Flexner Memorial Prize. Her work has been published in Nimrod International Journal, CV2, Roanoke Review, The Light Ekphrastic, and several anthologies. She is currently based in NC but spends half of the year on the road.
Kirby will receive a standard publishing contract, 25 author copies of the book, and a $1500 honorarium. Pareidolia is scheduled to be published in January, 2027.
