Announcing the Winners of the
2025 Our Lady of the Rosary Contest

Congratulations to the winners of CLA’s 2025 Our Lady of the Rosary Poetry Contest!

We thank all who entered the contest.  We trust that the poems from this contest contribute to the on-going Catholic Literary Revival with their ardent spiritual expression in skilled measures.

The finalists for this contest were: Emma Atkinson, Mary Colvin, Fred Gallagher, Elisa A. Garza, Nicholas Hanus, Christopher Honey, Katherine Iadipaolo, Lindsay Schlegel, Megan Thome, Lindsay Tsohantaridis

We encourage you to join us for the Virtual Celebration of Winners and Finalists with judge Tamara Nicholl-Smith, on Monday, October 6, 2025, 7:00 p.m. CST. Please register at this link to attend.

First Prize: Emma Atkinson
Second Prize: Megan Thome
Third Prize: Fred Gallagher
Honorable Mention: Lindsay Schlegel
Honorable Mention: Lindsay Tsohantaridis

This year’s 2025 Contest Judge is Tamara Nicholl-Smith.

Tamara Nicholl-Smith’s poetry has been featured on numerous radio shows, a spoken-word classical piano fusion CD, and public appearances. It has also appeared in print in many publications, including The Examined Life Journal, Catholic Arts Today and America. She is a popular faculty member for the Catholic Literary Arts/ virtual class series and longtime CLA member. Tamara inaugurated the CLA School Visits by a Catholic Poet in 2025.

Her poem on Saint Jerome is part of the display of the Guttenberg Bible installed at the University of Saint Thomas. Houston, Texas. Tamara is a member of Catholic Literary Arts and a contributor to the “Joy of Catholic Poetry” and “Resurrection Joy” presentations done at parishes, schools, and universities.  She coordinates the annual Catholic Literary Arts’ Sacred Poetry Contest which brings together poets from across the globe to write in response to curated artwork from both historical and contemporary sacred artists.

Honorable Mention

To Lose a Son
by Lindsay Schlegel

Thirteen years ago my evenings were spent 
Unable to speak, lost in the blue depth
Of swirls in the rug, sobs stealing my breath, 
My womb empty, my heart full of lament. 

At night, we tag-teamed prayer to orient
Our hearts to Our Lady’s—until the strength
Had to come from my husband. Our son’s death 
Had rendered me silent, lodged in torment.

These days I rotate a ring of roses,
Wrist on the wheel of a blue SUV.
In time my heart has healed and I’ve chosen
One decade per child, my progeny
Entrusted to the loving care of one
Who knows, too, what it is to lose a son. 

Second Place

An Ordinary Pietà upon my father’s death
by Megan Thome

An Ordinary Pietà
upon my father’s death

My father’s fathers
tended Our Mother’s roses,
praying bead through beautiful bead—
the sowers and the seeds,
a garden of glory bees,
and so it came to me.

In my fifth decade,
he on his final day,
Our Lady’s perfume cradles his room,
last graces feel too soon,
offering fruit of her womb
as my father’s viaticum.

Luminous and joyful,
glorious and sorrowful,
a lifetime of Hail Marys prayed.
Now is that very hour conveyed
we ask of the Lord’s handmaid.
Child, do not be afraid.

Inside his left chest pocket,
outside his sacred heart
Grandpa’s rosary still warming.
My heart adoring in mourning
the weight of his son’s story
and the weight of her Son’s glory.

Her fiat holds him … and surrenders.
His soul lets go … and remembers.
Kyrie, Kyrie eleison
Spirit of the Incarnation
breathed Thy will be done
from her, with him, to her beloved Son.

Honorable Mention

Pietá
by Lindsay Tsohantaridis

On a balcony, at seventeen, I counted beads
which left impressions on my fingertips
(uncalloused then). I quaked, fearing each
would combust like silver fulminate
and leave smoke marks in skin creases—
irrefutable proof of a partial papist heart
growing less impartial by stained glass
and painted domes and the stillness
of a pilgrim in a tourist-infested place.
Madness! chose the strand of onyx beads,
feather-light in hand of a heavy conscience
where Mary loomed as a silent leviathan
invented to swallow hallowed red letters
—a mere character of coincidence, her fiat
a footnote— until my tender soles (made weak
by younger soil) split open where stones
of ancient roads left impressions underfoot,
stepping as I had—struggling as I was— to see:
     a Mother of marble, her Son sprawled
     across a lap of herculean girth,
     bearing the weight of a lifeless God.
I pitied her; I remembered her: at dusk,
overlooking stone roads traversed, I tripped
over theotokos as though it were profanity,
yet followed her over tiny, glistening spheres
towards the Body sprawled across my palm.

Third Place

Mama’s Garden: A Meditation
by Fred Gallagher

Mama’s roses were near her Francis shrine,
by the patches of grass where we played ball
afternoons…by blooms and oncoming dusks.
I was somewhere around eleven when
it hit me, they were in a great oval:
ten crimson bushes, and a white, again
and again, and again and again, then
three down, a cross of ox-eye daisies like
ones she picked as a girl the sides of the
cow path home, rictal gazes calling her
to what, she knew not. Some days were sorrow,
all day in the sun on a folding chair,
Methodist mountain girl, convert grieving.
Her only girl, baby Barbara Ann, lived
not a day, ten beaded, Hail Mary hours.
Other days joy, neighborhood boys jawing
long at each other, in hopes of homeruns.
And glorious too, when she cut a few,
stripped stems of the thorns of sin, put them in
a vase middle of the kitchen table.
She sketched them in charcoal and, later on,
painted them in sweet sighing, inmost oils.
One I have still. Slowly, would she draw close
to the black-eyed, blue-robed lady above
the votives she lit at her feet weekday
Masses, by wondering of Her mother,
Ann, who raised her, and, by oncoming dusk,
and fading sunlight and whispered Aves
in summer showers of the rose garden,
by the redolent balm and the tears of
sorrow, joy and glory all down Mama’s
sunbaked skin… and all down her red rose cheeks.

Comments by Tamara Nicholl-Smith on Mama’s Garden: A Meditation

The strength of this blank verse poem comes from a skillful narrative unfolding and layering of details that provided this reader with delightful discovery. I realized the significance of the pattern of rose bushes in the garden along with the speaker's eleven-year-old self. The poem handles the mention of a tragedy adeptly and with restraint, the weight of which could have easily overwhelmed the poem or taken it in an entirely different direction. Instead, this event is nested within the larger context of the rosary as depicted in the rose meditation garden, a union of the literal and figurative. The final lines of this poem bring together the literal and figurative again through a striking image: the speaker's mother, tears of sorrow, joy, and glory streaming down her rose-red cheeks like beads on a rosary.

Comments by Tamara Nicholl-Smith on An Ordinary Pietà Upon My Father’s Death

This poem skillfully brings together two realities: the narrator's father's final hours and the mysteries of the rosary. Like two transparencies overlaid, the language often either doubles for both realities, or moves back and forth between them line by line. For example, in the line "In my fifth decade, / he on his final day," decade refers both to a person in their fifties and to the fifth decade of the rosary. In the final stanza, "Her fiat holds him … and surrenders. / His soul lets go … and remembers," the first line refers to Mary letting go of her son, while the second captures the speaker's father in his final moments.

The poem establishes this layering from the opening stanza, where the family's history is inseparable from their Marian devotion: tending roses and tending the rosary. This foundation helps us understand how the speaker fuses their father's death and the rosary mysteries into a single unified reality. The italicized prayers and phrases from the rosary and liturgy serve to ground us in the Catholic tradition, without being too heavy-handed or taking over the poem. There is no regular, discernible rhyme scheme, but heavy use of loose slant rhyme creates sonic echoes that serve to bind the two realities together.

First Place

The Weaving of the Wedding Crown
by Emma Atkinson

Where is your crown of roses, Son?
No matter, I will weave you one
With my own hands.

Give me again that gentle smile
And linger in the doorway while
I bind the strands,

And I will speak of marvels far
Beyond me—prophesies, a star,
My God made Man.

The rest, you will remember better
Than I—the Torah’s every letter
Which you began

To open, slowly, like a flower
Until the long-desired hour
Drew near at last:

The wedding, in itself a sign
Of things to come; the promised wine;
The look you cast

My way when it was done. Should I
Have known this meant that you would die?
Perhaps I did.

A mother has a way of knowing
Such things—like where her son is going.
But this you hid

Among the parables you told,
A thing so awful to behold,
Most did not see,

Nor did I fully, till you stood
Before me bathed in sweat and blood
Near Calvary.

Look—it is almost finished now—
The stems all form a single bough
Whose ends will meet.

And when this crown of yours is done,
I’ll set it on your head, my son,
And take my seat

Beside you on the royal throne.
My Lord and God, my flesh and bone,
All is complete.

Comments by Tamara Nicholl-Smith on The Weaving of the Wedding Crown

There is much to appreciate in this poem, both in its form and substance. Before a single word is read, the poem’s shape on the page captures our attention. The poem employs what I believe to be a nonce stanza form: two rhymed tetrameter lines capped by a dimeter line, reminiscent of Medieval tail-rhyme. Across its twelve tercets, the short dimeter lines rhyme in pairs, creating six discrete rhyming couplets that weave the whole together, echoing the interlaced pattern of the “wedding crown” in the title. The poet softens the rhyme through varied use of enjambment, at times even carrying thought across stanzas, which prevents the structure from feeling singsong or mechanical.

The speaker of the poem is an imagined Virgin Mary addressing her son in the manner one speaks aloud when there is no one around, providing a sense of intimacy. The language feels natural, believable. Everyday phrases such as "The rest, you will remember better /Than I" and "A mother has a way of knowing" provide a nice counterpoint to the deliberate form. Even familiar phrases from the Catholic imagination are rendered fresh in this context.

Form and content are seamlessly blended as the reader is carried through its twelve woven tercets until we arrive at the final declaration: All is complete. The phrase resonates both sonically, completing the poem's final rhyme, and thematically, as the completion of Mary's weaving echoes Christ's own words from the cross.