Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe has been revealed as the winner of the 2025 edition of The Indiana Review Poetry Prize.
A Nigerian poet. Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe is the winner of the 2020 Bloomsday Poetry and was longlisted for the 2022 Palette Poetry Emerging Poet Prize. Her works have been published by the Brittle Paper, Blue Marble, Poetry Column, and many other publications. Maryhilda is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Maryhilda has expressed her excitement about her big win on social media. In an enthusiastic tweet, she shares that the poem was in many ways her honest, unknowing, investigation, small and inadequate elegy for her grandmother, whose stories at once changed and troubled her.
The winning poem was judged by Sarah Ghazal Ali, a literary enthusiast and poet. Sara described the poem with these words:
“I was completely transfixed; at no point did the poet’s grip on me loosen. Memories are revisited, peeled back forensically in search of origins and answers, and in their retelling, all meaning is remade. Names are misheard and transformed, patterns are made and broken, and a grandmother becomes an “ark/ … carry[ing] a colony of voltas.” Indeed, in “rainmaker” the volta is an engine that propels each section forward, and after every turn lies another startling revelation.
The Indiana Review offers a $1000 prize and publication for a winning submission of up to three poems. The literary publication has been offering “carefully strange” literature since 1976. Over the past few decades, it has become a home to unique and dynamic literature, giving writers all over the world a chance to make their voices heard.
Congratulations, Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe!
Oreoluwa Odusote
Writer, poet, and dreamer.
