The editors of Cider Press Review are delighted to announce the winner of the 2025 Editors’ Prize Book Award.
Karen Holmberg of Corvallis, Oregon has won the 2025 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize Book Award with the manuscript, Reckless Shelter. Runner-up was The Opposite Wall, by Megan Merchant. Additional finalists (in alphabetical order) include deep is the skin of the world by Mermer Blakeslee, Doctrine of the Kite by Melody Wilson, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World by Shuly Cawood, and Ice Flowers by Caroline Wellman.
The editors all remarked on the sonic quality of this manuscript. Susan Azar Porterfield said, “This is very language conscious, very musical. For example:
On my wrist where it grazed
the oxeye daisy
a smear of foam—
lace curtain in which
a pale green wizard squirms.
John Bradley commented, “I really like the voice, as well as the language, which can be seen in the very first poem, making a ride on a Ferris wheel seem something new and strange. There are so many lines that show a keen ear and eye: ‘I draw on her elbow-length gloves / like skin, my hands / at last inside her hands again.'”
Karen Holmberg’s two poetry volumes are The Perseids (winner of the Vassar Miller Prize/University of North Texas Press) and Axis Mundi (winner of the John Ciardi Prize/BkMk Press). In addition to poetry, she publishes lyric essays and art criticism, appearing in At Length, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Notting Hill Editions Prize anthology. Recent poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, and were featured in High Country News. Her first young adult novel, The Collagist, won the 2021 Acheven Prize and was published by Regal Press/Fitzroy Editions in the spring of 2024. She teaches British Literature, poetry writing, and letterpress printing at Oregon State University, where she is on the MFA in Creative Writing faculty.
Holmberg will receive a standard publishing contract, 25 author copies of the book, and a $1000 honorarium. Reckless Shelter is scheduled to be published in August, 2026.
