Meet our Newest Ronald Moran Poetry Prizewinner, Evelyn Olmos

October 25, 2023

Each year, SCR presents the Ronald Moran Prize in Fiction and Poetry for the best fiction and poetry of the year. Our poetry winner for this year was Evelyn Olmos, with her poem “House of Mirrors,” from SCR 55.1.

Evelyn Olmos is an educator and poet residing in Albuquerque, NM. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. She has served as a Poetry Fellow for Chatter ABQ and as Editor-in-Chief of Blue Mesa Review in recent years. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Oakland Review, Hoxie Gorge Review, and Sidereal Magazine, amongst others. 

Read Olmos’ winning poem, “House of Mirrors,” here.

Here’s what Evelyn has to say about her poem:

“‘House of Mirrors’ was written in response to a comment my ex-husband made to me right after our divorce about how I only ever wrote poems that portrayed him as a bad person but had never managed to write him a love poem in the 9 years we were together. I was working on my MFA dissertation at the time and the poem came out fully formed after one afternoon (and one beer) as a rebuttal to his argument. I spent a lot of time those days thinking about what made a person ‘good’ and what made a person ‘bad,’ how in reality we are all too complex and complicated to be designated as either, and a good chunk of the poems in my manuscript play with this understanding. This poem stems from a necessity to make sense of surviving domestic violence, of the shame I carried, of the love I was afraid I would never be able to let go. In the end, I was genuinely asking the reader to tell me what was ‘willful dismemberment, if not love?’ because I had no idea. Maybe I still don’t.”