RJFWA Women Writers Receive 2025 Literary Honors

(l-r:) Janice N. Harrington , Amy Leach, Alison C. Rollins 

Janice N. Harrington (’09) received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry for her collection Yard Show (BOA Editions); Amy Leach (’08) received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay for her work The Salt of the Universe (FSG); and Alison C. Rollins (’18) was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry for her collection Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press).

Janice N. Harrington (RJFWA ’09) has published three previous books of poetry: Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, The Hands of Strangers, and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin all published by BOA Editions. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Cave Canem fellow. Also an award-winning children’s writer, Harrington teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois. Yard Show was also longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. (photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Amy Leach (RJFWA ’08) grew up in Texas and earned her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She is also the author of Things That Are (Milkweed, 2012) and The Everybody Ensemble (FSG, 2021) and her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, A Public Space, Ecotone, Tin House, Orion, and numerous other publications. She has been recognized with the Nautilus Book Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Bozeman, Montana. (photo: Ingrid Stuart)

Alison C. Rollins (RJFWA ’18) was awarded a 2023-24 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2019. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, her work, across genres, has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Alison holds an MFA from Brown University and an MSLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (photo: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)

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