Ex Ophidia Press is excited to announce that the winner of the 2025 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest is Smolder by Colleen Morton Busch. The winning book, chosen by Felicia Zamora, will be released in the summer of 2026. Colleen Morton Busch is the author of the nonfiction book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, selected as a best book of the year by Publisher’s Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble. In Smolder, she returned to her first writing language to explore the many kinds of fire blazing inside a life. Her poems and prose have been published widely, from Willow Springs, New Orleans Review, and Poet Lore to Orion, The Washington Post, and Yoga Journal, where she was a senior editor. She’s an alumna of Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Community of Writers, and Tin House Writers Workshop. She grew up in the heartland and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more about her work, visit www.colleenmortonbusch.com.
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