The Laura Boss Poetry Foundation winning manuscript for the 2025 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award is Terry Rae Hall of Virginia for her collection, Neither Are Crows.

Her collection will be published in Spring 2026 by NYQ Books. [https://www.nyq.org/books/]  This award includes a $5,000 prize, 25 author copies, and a featured reading at the book’s release.

Terry Rae Hall is the author of the chapbook The Something We Make from Nothing (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024). Other recent publication credits include Cider Press Review, San Pedro River Review, Pine Row Press, and Litmosphere.

This year’s final judge was Joe Weil, who said of Neither Are Crows:

“What I found triumphant about Neither Are Crows is the humility, accuracy, and sometimes gentle, sometimes dark humor of the poems. There is no showing off, yet there is subtle and constant trickery of the best sort. The poems remind me of the work of Robert Francis in their attention to detail and sound, though the world they describe is nothing like his rural Andover. The people and the landscape are one. They grow out of each other, out of flat lands and prairies. The book is held together by allusions to The Wizard of Oz, and that conceit is fully justified. Terry Hall Bodine deals superbly with both the mythos and reality of her Midwestern landscape. Not a single poem in Neither Are Crows is unnecessary. Not a single poem fails to give pleasure.”

Five finalists were also selected from the more than 200 manuscripts submitted. They will each receive a $100 award and be invited to read poems from their manuscripts along with Hall at The Poetry Center at PCCC in Paterson, New Jersey, on April 25, 2026.

The five finalists and their manuscript titles are: The Hard Problem, Sarah Anne Stinnett; Rowhome in Flickering Light, Daniel Donaghy;  Bird Mnemonic, Kelleen Zubick; Telling, Mary Paulson; and Cosmic Idiot, Michael Montlack.