2024 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest winner
Recovery Commands
Abby E. Murray’s Recovery Commands is a masterclass in that elusive quality in poetry we sometimes call voice. And what a voice it is – by turns rowdy and defiant, tender, sharply observant, candidly vulnerable, and wittily humorous.
Past Contest Winners
Ghost Heart
Mary Pinard
Winner of our 2021 Poetry Contest, this collection engages science and cultural history to explore the complex nature of the vanishing American prairie.
To Speak in Salt
Becky Thompson
For many years, Becky Thompson has brought poetry to refugees in Greece, and they have brought poetry to her. To Speak in Salt is a testimony to that exchange, packed with poems keenly observing people and places where “barbed wire doubles as a fence / a clothesline for diapers.”
Rosetta
Karina Borowicz
In this collection, winner of the 2019 poetry prize, noted poet Karina Borowicz creates a world within a world. The poems range over many aspects of life, yet are connected by a sense of coherence, continuity, and deeper meaning.
A Bird Who Seems to Know Me
Wally Swist
The connections between humans and birds are the central focus of the 2018 Poetry Prize winner. Wally Swist brings into focus, through poems and haiku written in the clarity of pure, direct language, the wildness that is often invisible in the urban landscape.
Rembrandt's Nose
Charles Wyatt
The poems in Charles Wyatt’s 2017 Poetry Prize winning collection conjure up Rembrandt and his world in clear, compelling poetry that paints a portrait of the great painter in words.
Old as Rainfall: Nature and People
Heidi Morrell
The 2016 winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize by Heidi Morrell focuses on nature and people ranging from locales as disparate as Hawaii and Paris. The balance and intersections of the people and place are masterful.
Additional Ex Ophidia Press Books
Since Then: Poems and Short Prose
Sheila Bender
A mother grapples with the long-ago loss of her son through poignant poems and letters addressed to him.
Found in a Letter, 1959: A Memoir in Poems
Sharon Cumberland
Sharon Cumberland uses letters written by her father, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, while he was a Sloan Fellow at M.I.T. to construct poems in his voice as he reviews the course of his life, his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and his relationships with his family members.
Fantasies and Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer
Richard-Gabriel Rummonds
A massive 813-page memoir illustrated with copious photographs of both books and people. It is a veritable who’s who of the Italian art scene and international literary circles of the 1970s and beyond.
Fruit from a Wild Orchard
New and Selected Poems by David Lavar Coy
Fruit from a Wild Orchard selects from poems written over four decades – from the 1980s to the present – by a quintessentially Western American poet.
Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest
The Ex Ophidia Press Annual poetry contest is named in honor of Richard-Gabriel Rummonds who founded Ex Ophidia Press in 2014. The prize is for a full-length poetry collection.
About the Press
Our mission is to explore new territories of the imagination by using the traditional techniques of poetry.