The First Place winner of the Paul Hughes Memorial  Award for 2025 is Maia Clark. Maia is not only an  accomplished poet and short story writer, but was one of  the editors for the 2025 edition of Originals. In her own  words, “I hesitate to call myself a poet. I did not always  write poetry. I was a creative writer. I wrote prose. I  preferred prose. And that is because I did not know  poetry. When I wrote prose, I was trying to do what  poetry does. I was trying to express motifs that begged to  exist beyond subtext. I think that this desire gave me a ‘heavy’ authorial hand. With poetry, the heavy hand is a  weapon that you can wield with tact. I liked that. With  poetry, the art of implication is also tactical. And I liked that, too. 

To me, the poem is a snapshot. It's a series of verbal  images that coalesce into a comprehensive portrait of  something. Sometimes these portraits are similar to still  life paintings; they capture a curated image that  suggests something deeper. Sometimes they are an  impressionistic homage to fleeting moments. Sometimes  they are the marriage of the tangible and the intangible.  But nevertheless, they are, like any work of art, an  expression of an idea or string of ideas too great to exist  only in the unreal. The poem is the vehicle in which the  unreal is actualized.”