West Trade Review Prize for Poetry 2026
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We are happy to announce the results for our fifth annual West Trade Review Prize for Poetry contest.
GRAND PRIZE ($1000 & publication in the spring 2027 print edition): Justin Rigamonti ("News Crawler")
Justin Rigamonti teaches English at Portland Community College and serves as the Poetry Coordinator for Chatter PDX. His poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New Ohio Review and Rattle. His poem “Failure” was selected to appear in Best New Poets 2025. He lives with his partner Jessie Carver in Cottage Grove, OR.
"Why not face the apocalypse with a joyous clutching of what we love? I too want to love more strangely, to find a way to celebrate not the end-times, but in the end-times, or rather celebrate what we fear losing most, to shout the affirmations of what we must save, even as it seems irretrievably lost. Nothing is ever lost if it's in a poem, so thank you "News Crawler" for keeping this moment from oblivion." -Jason Schneiderman, Contest Judge
Look for Justin's poem in the Spring 2027 print edition.
Honorable Mention: Isaac Salazar ("Raw")
Isaac Salazar is an Austin-born and Houston-based poet. A winner of the 2025 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize, his poems have been published or forthcoming in AGNI, Asterales, Bear Review, Hayden's Ferry, Honey Literary, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. He is a graduate student at Rice University.
"I love this exploration of how our bodies are bounded, but porous, open in ways that we choose and ways that we do not. There is both pleasure and risk in the opening of the self to another, but even the other is porous. As this poem pans to take in the scale of the body, the organ, the cell, the molecule, "Raw" limns how our isolations and connections are so much more than first meets the eye."
-Jason Schneiderman, Contest Judge
Look for Isaac's poem in the Summer 2026 edition of West Trade Review.
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2026 Contest Judge: Jason Schneiderman
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). Other titles include Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020); Primary Source (Red Hen Press, 2016), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Prize; Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize, and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004), a Stahlecker Selection.
His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House.
He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2015).
He is also the author of Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2025) and Teaching Writing Through Poetry: Understanding Poetic Form and Its Power to Unleash Creative Expression (Bloomsbury, 2025).
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