We are pleased to announce the results of the Ninth Letter Regeneration Award for 2025.
The Regeneration Award is a multi-genre contest presented in partnership with I-Regen and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to amplify work thematically connected to the idea of “regeneration,” especially revolving around food, agriculture, and ecology.
Our lives and communities revolve around food: hungering for it, buying it, preparing it, and eating it, but also growing it, moving it from field to shelf, and disposing of its waste. Just as healthy food promotes human health, healthy food systems promote healthy communities—places and people oriented toward restoration, regeneration, and even rebirth. What would it look like to live in a world where our food systems regenerated not only us, but the planet? What if how we grew and ate our food could sequester carbon, replenish the soil, restore ecosystem biodiversity, and help battle disease?
Each year, the winner of the Regeneration Award are chosen by a guest editor from an impressive list of finalists as determined by Ninth Letter editors and editorial assistants.
2025 Regeneration Award Winner
Austen Camille, “Five Poems”
Austen Camille’s poetry will be published in our Fall/Winter 2025-26 print issue and on our website.
Finalists
Susan Futrell, Timothy Knapp, Ian Ursaki Lockaby, Abby Minor, Carolynn Mireault, Samantha Strong Murphey
Guest Judge
Scott Chaskey is the author of Soil and Spirit (Milkweed 2023). His poetry, first printed in literary journals in the early seventies, has been widely published over four decades. A pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for thirty years he cultivated more than sixty crops for the Peconic Land Trust at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York, one of the original CSAs in the country.
