New York, NY (April 22, 2025)—Poems have long served as a powerful means to offer an urgent form of advocacy through language, bridging the gap between knowledge and response and drawing on the tools of imagination to make complex issues more immediate and personally resonant. For Earth Day, which is today, April 22, the Academy of American Poets announces the three winners of the 2025 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, which honors exceptional poems that help readers recognize the vulnerable state of our environment. All three poems will be published in the popular Poem-a-Day series, which is distributed to over 1,000,000 individuals each day via email and podcast, on Poets.org, and across social media. In addition, the first-place winner will receive $1,000; second place, $750; and third place, $500.
The winning poems and poets are:
- First Place: “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem” by Rachel Dillon, to be published in Poem-a-Day on April 27
- Second Place: “The Sea / Is Sacred Still” by Andrew Calis, to be published in Poem-a-Day on May 4
- Third Place: “Future History of Earth’s Birds” by Amie Whittemore, to be published in Poem-a-Day on May 11
This year’s winners were selected by judges J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur Fellow, poet laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina, and a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, and Dr. T. Jane Zelikova, an award-winning ecologist and the executive director of the Sustainability Research Initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Sign up for Poem-a-Day to read the winning poems on the selected dates.
Rachel Dillon is a poet, teacher, and editor from Arlington, Massachusetts. She holds degrees from Brandeis University and Boston University, where she received an MFA in poetry and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Her work appears in Poet Lore, Verse Daily, Asheville Poetry Review, and Driven to Write. Dillon received the 2024 Susan Kamil Emerging Writers Prize from the BINC Foundation. A former New York City public school teacher, she is now managing editor of Ploughshares and lives in Boston. About her first-place poem, judges J. Drew Lanham and Dr. T. Jane Zelikova wrote the following:
“A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem” lives within the irony of both deep demise and the illumination of the forever ephemeral. The couplets are waves, or soundings; the words precise but unsure. The certainty of this poem draws one down to the depths of fate and the necessity of endings for beginnings. Nothing dies in this poem. It asks us to be brave for what is to come. Especially now, bravery is what is needed, even if we have to pretend and hope that bravery is what follows. Our hands, so industrious and yet ruinous for so many species with which we share this planet, are called to action at the end of the poem. Our hands are needed to repair what has been broken and to hold close what we cherish.
Andrew Calis is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, and teacher from Maryland. He holds a PhD in English from The Catholic University of America and is the author of Which Seeds Will Grow? (Paraclete Press, 2024), a Pushcart Prize–nominated collection. He has also been awarded the Zócalo Poetry Prize. Calis lives near Baltimore. About his second-place poem, the judges wrote:
The pacing of “I will let you think the sea / is sacred still. // Perhaps, then, / you will try to save it” plays with urgency, which builds. “The Sea / Is Sacred Still” seems tidal in its inquisitive invitation to sit, to stand, to save. The inquiry into experience is made palpable by words that one feels, especially when reading the poem aloud. Let the lines rise and fall, then slack. The lineation brings to mind the shoreline, then the abysmal and dark depths, and finally the inevitability of all becoming saltwater, again.
Amie Whittemore is the author of three poetry collections, including Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). A former poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University. Whittemore holds degrees from the University of Illinois, Lewis and Clark College, and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. About her third-place poem, the judges wrote:
“Future History of Earth’s Birds” is avian demise wrapped in thin shells, with the unhatched learning of horrible fates to come. It is kites at some pinnacle, or nadir of evolution, dropping fire onto a burning world that they didn’t ignite, while also providing humans with the field guide how-to instructions. Who’s to blame? The heart of it lies here: “Does it matter // what kind of birds did this? They’re all dead now.” These lines are solemn pronouncements of avian fate laid at the feet of humanity, which will suffer that same fate. No canaries were harmed during the writing of this poem, but our hearts heard them stop singing.
Read more information about the prize, including the full guidelines.
About the Judges
J. Drew Lanham is a poet, ornithologist, and MacArthur Fellow. His books include Sparrow Envy and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. He holds an endowed chair at Clemson University, where he received the Rowland Alston Award for Excellence. In 2022, he was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.
Dr. T. Jane Zelikova is an ecologist and science communicator working at the intersection of research and climate solutions. She is the executive director of the Sustainability Research Initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder and cofounder of 500 Women Scientists. Her work appears in the anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, and she coproduced the award-winning short film The End of Snow.
About Treehouse Investments
Treehouse Investments, LLC, is a minority-owned infrastructure investment firm dedicated to addressing climate change. Treehouse focuses on decentralized infrastructure because it believes that infrastructure provides the foundation on which all other human endeavors are built, and decentralized solutions incorporate the resilience our world increasingly needs.
About the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the United States’ leading champion of poets and poetry. The organization annually awards more than $1.3 million to poets across the nation. It also operates Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded poetry website, and organizes National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world. Additionally, the Academy publishes Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine, provides free educational resources for K–12 educators and adult learners, and leads the Poetry Coalition, a network of organizations dedicated to promoting the vital role of poetry in our culture. Visit poets.org for more information.