NZSA member, Wes Lee, has been awarded second and third prize in The Plaza Poetry Prize 2025, selected by the judge, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz.

The winning, commended, and shortlisted poems (for an individual poem with a maximum length of 60 lines) have been announced on The Plaza Prizes website.

‘Reading the finalist poems for the Plaza Prize was like shining a bright light into my end of winter days. Many of the poems were pulsing and rippling with emotional imagery and powerful ruminations on what it means to be alongside one another in this world, as miraculous beings, despite our wounds and losses.’ —Natalie Diaz

Natalie’s Postcolonial Love Poem won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow.

The Plaza Prizes offer a prize pool of over £20,000 (US$30,000).

The awards ceremony will be held in the Dordogne, France on 16th October 2025 where The Plaza Prizes Anthology 3 will be launched.