2023 Video Contest Winners & Runners-Up
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL WINNERS AND FINALISTS IN THE 2023 BUTTON POETRY VIDEO CONTEST
Watch previous winners on our YouTube channel
Rachel Camacho is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and misfit educator with three acclaimed full-length books of poetry, blud (2017) Into the Dark & Emptying Field (2013) and Pink Elephant (2009, re-released in 2026.)
In 2012, Camacho founded The Pink Door Writing Retreat, an annual intensive held exclusively for non-men writers of color in upstate New York.
Camacho was recently the subject of the podcast We Were Three, from the producers of Serial.
She believes Palestine will be free in her lifetime.
Happy Release Day to Daniel Elias Galicia and STILL DESERT!
Statement from Author:
“STILL DESERT is a collection of poems about the border: a place where life is too often stunned into stillness by tragedy and the crisis that is the border itself.
In that stillness, how do we seek peace, rights for humans and animals, reconciliation, hope, survival, and healing and renewal? In these poems, racism, xenophobia, hatred, bigotry, loss, and death clash against our universal longing for love, fulfillment, empowerment, and a sense of belonging and home.
From this tension emerges a poetic desire to find a painful yet important beauty in the lived experiences of this region’s people. The collection moves through a landscape scorched by the desert sun’s oppressive heat, where each poem searches for relief, redemption, and the rare, precious gift of rain.”
More about Still Desert:
Finalist for the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, Daniel Elias Galicia’s debut collection, Still Desert sings with histories both haunting and enchanting.
Artistically and linguistically dynamic, Galicia’s poems weave personal and historical narratives of immigration, assimilation, and Mexican heritage. Still Desert lingers in the spaces between borders and crossings, breathing in rich, tactile environments and raw, complex emotions. With a musical rage and a sacred love, Galicia speaks to unsung lineages and the violences found before, during, and after crossing the border.
Like what you see? Get your copy today!
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Learn More This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageStill Desert
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Learn More This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageWild/Hurt
$18.00
Happy Publication Day to Forgotten Necessities!
“I’m not mad I sold my youth, just that I sold it so cheap.”
Jared Singer in Forgotten Necessities
In his anticipated second collection, Forgotten Necessities, Jared Singer wears love and loss on his skin.
Through spell-bindingly immersive storytelling, Singer digs to the roots of our deepest woes and cradles our joys with utmost tenderness. Intimacy and vulnerability ache across the time and space of these poems. Forgotten Necessities holds its sadness sacredly and builds shrines to the hope that follows. Persistent reminders of the small kindnesses that make a life meaningful to the living and the dead. A brilliant follow-up to his debut, Singer’s Forgotten Necessities is itself a necessity, a haunting that heals.
Check out a performance from Jared Singer down below!
About Jared:
Facebook @JaredSingerwriter
Jared Singer is an Audio Engineer and poet who lives in Secaucus, NJ. While he may have physically grown up with his peers, he has never forgotten the imagination, magic, and nerdiness that were cornerstones of his childhood. He hopes to remind others of these more creative times. He has also appeared on the Indiefeed Performance Poetry Podcast. He has represented New York eight times at the National Slam level, including two final stage appearances at the National Poetry Slam. Jared has long believed in the healing power of the mountains, kittens, and lists of three.
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Learn More This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageForgotten Necessities
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It’s Publication Day for Wild/Hurt!
Snag a copy of Meg Ford’s book.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Wild/Hurt by Meg Ford takes the abstract ‘journey’ of trauma recovery and makes it concrete with interactive poetics.
As a reader we are immersed in multiple paths that mirror the choices, experiences, and struggles one makes when reclaiming themselves in the face of abuse.
While being intensely personal, Wild/Hurt moves resonantly through memory and healing in a way that can speak to many survivors. Through its hardships and suffering, this collection comes to realize and love the intimate parts of itself. Ford’s work encompasses a survivor’s entire personhood–growing from their trauma, discovering and celebrating queerness, and living and loving with disability.
Wild/Hurt is a rich, heartfelt collection that makes the reading an experience, telling a new, remarkable story with each reread.
What stories will you tell?
Wild adventure and hurt feelings await!
ABOUT FORD
Meg Ford is a queer writer from New Jersey who was voted Most Likely to Leave and Never Come Back. They are a two-time National Poetry Slam semi-finalist with the Boston Poetry Slam Team and received their MFA from Emerson College. Their work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, NAILED, PANK, and the We Will Be Shelter Anthology from Write Bloody. Meg can most often be found hanging out with the cat at your party.
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Wild/Hurt
$18.00
gigi bella has been ranked the tenth best woman poet in the world (WOWPS 2017), the two time Project X Bronx Poetry Champion and a National Poetry Slam Champion. She currently has 100,000+ views on YouTube with mega poetry conglomerate, Button Poetry. Her book, big feelings, is available through Game Over Books and is a Small Press Distribution Bestseller. Her one woman show of the same title made its international debut at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. She will make her feature film debut in 2025 with A24 in Ari Aster’s forthcoming work.
It’s Publication Day for Bubble Gum Stadium!
Snag a copy of Jalen Eutsey’s book.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A home is made by the memories it holds, and in Bubble Gum Stadium, Jalen Eutsey makes us his house guests.
Flush with the rich colors of South Florida, these poems immerse you in a history of a place and its people. Bubble Gum Stadium grips the reader with its immersive recollections and starkly beautiful language. We’re given a scrapbook black community and coming-of age, so lovingly rendered in the backdrop of West Perrine.
Memory offered as a gift, one Eutsey asks us to treasure; after all, what happens when it’s gone?
ABOUT EUTSEY
Jalen Eutsey was a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has been the recipient of a Rubys Artist Grant and a Hatty Fitts Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Best New Poets, Nashville Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was born and raised in Miami.
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Learn More This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageBubble Gum Stadium
Price range: $16.00 through $20.00
Carson Wolfe is a Mancunian poet 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Runner-Up and winner of New Writing North’s Debut Poetry Prize (2023). Their work has appeared with Rattle, The Rumpus, The North, The Common, Best New Poets, and is forthcoming with POETRY. They were longlisted in The Poetry Society’s National Competition (2023), and have received awards from The Aurora Poetry Prize, and The Edward Thomas Fellowship.
Kristina Percy (she/ her) lives with her husband & two young children on Vancouver Island, BC in the traditional territories of the Ligwiłda’xw people. Neither of her degrees have anything to do with creative writing. Her work has been published extensively in her Gmail drafts folder, & you can also find it on Instagram @__kpwrites.
Her debut collection, Both True, was a runner up in the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming from Button Poetry in Fall 2025.