2025 Stephen Ross Huffman Memorial Poetry Award Winners Announced Story By: Dr. Jacqueline Kolosov

Thanks to the generosity of the Huffman family, the Stephen Ross Huffman Memorial Poetry Award continues to live on in our department, honoring talented students for their individual poems.

This year's winner of a $700 scholarship is Devin Donaho for "Come." One of the judges wrote of the poem: "The form and voice of this poem deeply compliment the content, and every word serves its purpose."

The three finalists, each receiving a $350 scholarship, include Arissa Rainey for "Alabaré," Paytn Hodgkens for "The Feminine Path," and Ashley Blair for "The Cartographer's Daughter."

Rather than single out the judges' invaluable praise, it feels most valuable to foreground each of the student's reasons for submitting: "I am applying for this award because of my love for poetry and my thankfulness for the creative writing course I have taken at Texas Tech," Devin Donaho wrote, "which made the intricacies of this poem possible."

Arissa Rainey submitted "because of how writing changed my perspective last semester. … It allowed me to be seen. I hope I can continue writing for the rest of my life." Patyn Hodgkens stated that their poem "articulate[s] the frequently unspoken emotional labor of growing into womanhood … an experience often shaped by worry, expectation, and a strange mixture of beauty and burden." For Ashley Blair, the experience of taking a poetry class and writing this poem "opened a part of my voice I didn't know how to access before. As a nontraditional undergraduate balancing family, work, and school, I often write late at night, and poetry gives me a way to shape those scattered hours into something meaningful."

We want to thank the 58 students who submitted to this year's award and the three judges who reviewed these poems: Professors John Beusterien from CMLL and Professors Kristi Osorio and Maia Elgin Wegmann from English.