The 2025 Family & Home Prize Winners and Finalists
We’re thrilled to congratulate Bertha Crombet, the winner of Frontier Poetry’s 2025 Family & Home Prize! Her poem “THIS COUNTRY CALLED LIFE,” was selected by Sean Hill as the first place winner. Our readers and editors were enrapt by the quiet vulnerability and sincerity in this contest’s submissions. Thank you so much for sharing your poetic stories about loved ones with us. As always, we are so grateful for the continued support of our submitters, readers, and friends.
Bertha Crombet has been awarded the first-place prize of $3000. Emily Clarke was selected as the second-place winner and Laura Kim as the third place winner. Find the full list of our winners and finalists below. We look forward to publishing their work throughout early March.
Thank you to all who submitted, it was a pleasure to consider your work.
WINNER
Bertha Crombet
“THIS COUNTRY CALLED LIFE”
Bertha Isabel Crombet was born in a tiny town on a hill about 15 miles from Santiago, Cuba, but lived in Miami for twenty-one years, where she received her MFA in Poetry from Florida International University. She’s been published in Black Warrior Review, The New Guard, and others. In the summer of 2024, she acquired her PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Most recently, her work was selected to be featured in the Best New Poets anthology, 2025.
SECOND PLACE
Emily Clarke
“all the men I love carry pocketknives”
Emily Clarke is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and a Scorpio, traditional Bird Dancer, and avid believer in reading for pleasure. She is also a recipient of Hayden’s Ferry Review’s National Indigenous Poets Prize, as well as a beadwork artist and community programmer. Her current obsessions include thinking deeply about writing a new poem but never actually putting pen to paper, the color pink, 1000-page-long Romantasy novels, and making beaded earrings inspired by her favorite aesthetics. Emily strives to create work that serves as a personal and community-conscious representation of Indigenous femininity. When she is not writing poems or organizing various events, she can be found surrounded by beads, sparkly lip gloss, and cat hair.
THIRD PLACE
Laura Kim
“한 han”
Laura Kim has been a writer, performer, and poetry event organizer for over 15 years, beginning in Seattle’s Poetry Slam scene. Their poems and writing have appeared in Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Korean publications, Ildaro and Korean Expose, and The Motherland, an anthology of poetry written by Korean adoptees and Korean Single Mothers translated in English, Korean, and adoptees native languages by Todam Media (토담미디어).
The Finalists
Ankita Sadarjoshi
Dante Clark
Alexis Deese-Smith
Rebecca Hawkes
Amy Raasch
Laura Kim
xochi quetzali cartland
Stacy Boe Miller
Zixuan Xin
