The Poetry Box LIVE – Prizewinners Edition!
Saturday, Feb 7, 2026 @ 1:00 PM (Pacific)
12pm (Alaskan) / 2pm (Mountain) / 3pm (Central) / 4pm (Eastern)
Featuring Winners from our 2025 Chapbook Contest
- John Arthur (NJ) – author of Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide
- Katie Dozier (TX) – author of All That Glitter
- John Wojtowicz (NJ) – author of No Lightsabers in the Kitchen
- George Bilgere (OH) — 2025 Contest Judge, Special Guest
How to Join Zoom Show:
PLEASE NOTE: EVERYONE MUST REGISTER IN ADVANCE.
About the Featured Poets:
Grand Prize Winner, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025
John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Frogpond, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, and many other places. He has worked as a valet at a casino, a waiter, a Ferris Wheel operator, a cook, a pizza delivery driver, a fast food delivery driver, a kati roll delivery driver, a landscaper for a week or so, a journalist, an editor, a librarian, a library director, a municipal manager, and for one long, hot day as a guy going door to door asking if you’d like to donate to the Sierra Club. His band is The Deafening Colors.
You can learn more about John’s book HERE
Editor’s Choice Winner, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025
Katie Dozier’s love of poetry first bloomed as a child. She memorized Robert Frost sitting on a tree stump and bathed in Edgar Allan Poe as an adolescent. While studying words at Florida State University, KHD also played with chips and became a professional poker player. She’s passionate about encouraging others to discover and share contemporary poetry, through her X account (@Katie_Dozier), her Substack, and NFTs. KHD is the author of All That Glitter, Watering Can: a Month of Poems, and the co-author of Hot Pink Moon: a Crown of Haibun and Did You See the Moon Honey. She is the creator of the top-rated podcast The Poetry Space_, the haiku editor for One Art, and an editor at Rattle. Katie lives in The Woodlands, Texas, with her husband Timothy Green, their four children, and way too many books.
You can learn more about Katie’s book HERE
Designer’s Choice Winner, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025
John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey” with his wife and two children. Currently, he teaches social work at Rowan College South Jersey. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile Podcast. Several of his poems were selected for Princeton University’s 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices exhibition at the Lewis Center for the Arts. When not writing, teaching, or rolling around in the yard, he enjoys monitoring bluebird boxes, volunteering at the Cohanzick Zoo, and flipping horseshoe crabs.
You can learn more about John’s book HERE
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has called George Bilgere’s work “a welcome breath of fresh, contemporary air in the house of American poetry.” Bilgere has read his poems at the Library of Congress, the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Chautauqua Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. NPR listeners know him from his many appearances on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and A Prairie Home Companion. He has received grants and awards from the Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Foundation. He is a recipient of the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, the Ohioana Poetry Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. His work received the Editor’s Choice Award from the New Ohio Review in 2022, and in 2023 he won the Reader’s Choice Award from Rattle. His eighth collection of poetry, Central Air, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in March, 2022. His new book, Cheap Motels of My Youth, won the Rattle Press Chapbook Prize in 2023 and appeared in 2024.
You can learn more about George HERE
