Introducing the winners of the 2019 Discovery Poetry Contest: Alfredo Aguilar, Bernard Ferguson, Omotara James and Alycia Pirmohamed.

Over the decades, 92Y’s poetry contest has discovered such poets as John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Mark Strand and Mary Jo Bang. Preliminary judges were Timothy Donnelly and Mai Der Vang. The final judges were Daniel Borzutzky, Randall Mann and Patricia Smith. 

Alfredo Aguilar is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook What Happens on Earth. 

Bernard Ferguson is a Bahamian immigrant poet, an MFA candidate at NYU and a Writers in the Public Schools fellow. He’s the winner of the 2019 Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Prize and a 2019 Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholar.

Omotara James is the author of the chapbook Daughter Tongue, selected by African Poetry Book Fund for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants.

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland, where she is completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of the chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind, and the winner of the 2018 Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Contest in Poetry.