The poet ruth Weiss embodied awareness of all living things and a commitment to Mother Earth. Our 2022 applicants showed a devotion to the planet, the local environment, or some aspect of nature that appealed to them. The Foundation received works from passionate poets who showed similar dedication.

A performance artist, entrepreneur, and writer hailing from Staten Island, NY, Elizabeth is the 2022 NYC Youth Poet Laureate and the 2022 YPL Northeast Regional Ambassador/National Youth Poet Laureate Finalist. A fierce advocate for educational equity, she is a Daily Point of Light Award-nominated, co-founder/co-director of Bridge to Literacy, a global, UNESCO-recognized U.S Department of State-funded nonprofit that fosters a love of language through literacy-based mentorship in 150+ youth across 6 continents.

Oakley Flanagan is a writer and poet from the West Midlands, by way of Ireland. As a playwright: ‘This Queer House’, VAULT Festival, directed by Masha Kevinovna, produced by OPIA Collective. Their poetry appears in bath magg, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The North, Under the Radar and Wasafiri, as well as anthologised work for 3 of Cups Press, Hachette UK and Trapeze. Oakley is an alum of Roundhouse Poetry Collective and The London Library Emerging Writer Programme. They are a current member of The Genesis Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers' Programme. Oakley’s pamphlet is forthcoming with Out-Spoken Press.

Sharon Coleman is a fifth generation Northern Californian with a penchant for languages and their entangled word roots. Her winning poem “was it for this” explores generational trauma and healing in an ecological context. It’s one section from her book-length manuscript "hand-me-down."

Megumi Jindo is an upcoming junior in NYC—a rising poet—using her poems to create change and bring solace for the betterment of the world and its peoples. She has been published in various magazines and have received multiple recognitions on her writing.

王潇/Evan Wang is a young writer from Pennsylvania. His work has been published in Philadelphia Stories, National Poetry Quarterly, Juste Milieu, and elsewhere, as well as performed at the Our America Now festival. He is the 2022 recipient of the Youth Appreciation Award, awarded by Optimist International, and an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Evan is an Anaphora Fellow and a mentee of Peter LaBerge. His poem "God's Eye" illustrates the want and desire that both human and plants share.

Yasmin Zainab Bergemann is a student at Yale University, where she studies Ecology & Evolutionary Biology with urban and landscape design in mind. She wrote this poem while living in New York for the summer, where she felt very strongly the disconnect between her constrained apartment life and that of the rest of the natural world.

Grace Yu is a writer and poet based in New York City. Her poems explore the beauty of the natural world, overlapping identities and cultural experiences. She is passionate about health and educational disparities as well as music, and is a recipient of the Sarah S. Weisberg Poetry Prize. Grace's poem "Love Story" is a homage to the diversity of marine life and the stunning loveliness of the ocean.

Shams Alkamil [she/her/hers] believes in holding space for Black neurodivergents. She is Sudanese-American, and often questioned her identity as a Black woman living in the heart of the Middle East. Her work started as unconstructed poems to calm down the chaos of an unforgiving neurotypical world. She aims to pass limits of rhythmic poetry, explore ideas of hybrid identities, and give a presence to unheard maternal ancestors.

Fran Markover is a poet from Ithaca, NY. She writes narratives of her personal family as well as the sacred family around her: plants, animals, the environment. She's been writing poems for over 3 decades. Her poem, "The Rubbing of Coco's Sole," reflects her sorrow and empathy for our earthly neighbors with whom we share our planet.

Emily Harwitz is a naturalist and storyteller whose work celebrates the beauty and diversity of life while raising awareness to protect it. With a background in chemistry and ecology, she enjoys telling stories that explore and expand our connections to nature and each other while investigating how identity, science, and art intersect. By day, she is a science and environmental journalist, writer, and photographer. By night, she writes poetry with her gecko Enkidu in the light of the moon. Her poem "I would I were" explores the physics of intellectual flight towards an ecological collective consciousness.

Kelly Grey is a writer, poet and Ayurvedic Practitioner. She is currently finishing a book on ayurveda and the seasons that is infused with art, personal stories and poetry. Her poem WOLF was inspired by a dear friend she met in her early 20's. At a time when the people surrounding her didn't believe in mysticism and didn't know how to sit with pain and loss authentically, she found solace, inspiration and joy in their friendship.

Paul Brooke hails from Iowa, where he combines poetry, photography and science. He travels widely and has published a definitive book on jaguars (of the Northern Pantanal). His most recent environmental project included photographing pumas in Chile, learning how to use a Scanning Electron Microscope and finishing a book Pantagruelian: Photographs and Poems of Torres del Paine. "Salvadora" is a selection from this book and tells a myth about a woman who lives with pumas in order to save herself and them.

Alex Gurtis is a poet and book reviewer based in Orlando, Florida. A winner of Saw Palm’s Florida Flora & Fauna Poetry Contest, Alex is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida. His work focuses on how art responds to the climate emergency and inspires us to persevere in times of crisis. His poem, “Ode to the Coral Reef”, plays with form to mimic the life and movement of the sea forms depicted in Chihuly’s work, giving the Earth’s dying reefs life after death.

Denise Leto is a multidisciplinary poet, writer and dance dramaturge. Her current project, home (Body), which explores natural and built environments is a collaborative poetry/dance/video installation and performance at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. She does cross-genre, disability culture work with the international art collective, Olimpias. She recently completed her poetry manuscript The Body is a Wild Summons.

Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Wildness, The Literary Review, Pleiades, Women's Studies Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prelude, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere.