Announcing Telling the Bees—Winner of BLR’s 2026 Allman Prize for Poetry

Publication forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review’s Spring 2026 issue

I’m honored to share that my prose poem “Telling the Bees” has been awarded the 2026 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry from Bellevue Literary Review. The poem will appear in BLR’s Spring 2026 issue.

I wrote this poem in the early months after my father died. I kept returning to the old ritual of “telling the bees,” a tradition in which beekeepers announced deaths or major changes in the household to their hives. Something about the gesture—quiet, ceremonial, almost private—held a truth I needed. A way of asking the natural world to witness what felt too heavy to carry alone.

Prize judge Patricia S. Jones described the poem as one that uses mythic framing to hold grief

“Poets often return to sayings, proverbs, myths as frames for important topics: love, rage, and in this emotionally intense prose poem, grief, where the bees serve as witness and as chorus to the poet’s sorrow. The poet has done the hard work of telling their story.”

There’s an ache in celebrating something made from loss. I keep thinking about how my dad would have reacted to this news—how quickly he would have shared it, how proud he would have been. I wish I could tell him, so very deeply, so very badly. That longing sits inside the work too.

I’ll share the spring issue link when it’s available.

If you’d like to read some of my writing now, my recent poems appear in American Poetry Journal, Pine Hills Review, LEON Literary Review, and Sky Island Journal. You can also subscribe to get my posts of new work published virtually here on Medium.

Telling the Bees

Two poems I’ve loved for years—both titled “Telling the Bees”—shaped my emotional lineage for this piece. I carried them with me long before my father died, and even more closely afterward:

• Deborah Digges: “Telling the Bees”

• Lizette Woodworth Reese: “Telling the Bees”