Fresno State’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing announced Los Angeles author Jia-Rui Cook won the 2025 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, which includes a $2,000 award and publication of her debut poetry collection, “Soft Beasts.”
The creative writing program sponsors the national prize, which honors Levine, the late poet and Fresno State professor emeritus of English. Levine won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and he was the 2011 poet laureate of the United States.
The Levine Prize is awarded annually in partnership with New York-based Black Lawrence Press, which has published contemporary works of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction by new, emerging and established authors since 2004.
Levine Prize final judge Jake Skeets — a poet, educator, National Poetry Series winner and National Endowment for the Arts grantee — chose Cook’s manuscript as the winner. There were 789 submissions. Skeets wrote of the winning entry:
“Moving through night markets and post-apocalyptic bars, ‘Soft Beasts’ is both wonder and wander. Its pages hold stark, living images of place: gas stations, oarfish, tulip trees, ‘a throng of frogs.’ I cherish this book for how it teaches us to be alive in the present moment: worrying about old socks, carrying the stories of our families. Cook is an exciting voice in American poetry.”
Cook is a Chinese American writer, editor and producer who currently works as a senior communications officer at the California Wellness Foundation. Her poetry recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alta Journal, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, the Missouri Review, Only Poems, Puerto del Sol, SWWIM Every Day and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
She won the Zócalo Public Square poetry prize in 2013 and is a 2026 Periplus fellow. Cook was once a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and served as the news events and projects lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
The Philip Levine Prize for Poetry is an annual national book contest open to all poets, except current or former students or faculty at Fresno State. Associate professor Brynn Saito coordinates the contest as part of the university’s English 242 graduate course, “Literary Editing and Publishing,” which provides students with hands-on professional experience in the publishing field. The contest offers a $2,000 prize plus publication and distribution by Black Lawrence Press.
