Poet and translator Christopher Childers (MFA ’16) has won the 2025 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry, for his poem “Lalage.” The annual prize is awarded by the Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, where Frost and his family lived from 1900-1909. This year’s prize was judged by Maryann Corbett, who wrote about Childers’s poem:

“One of the best games a poem can play is to revel in the pure sounds of language and the fun the human tongue can have with it. This poem grabs that ball and runs. The title ‘Lalage’ seems to come from Greek and to mean ‘prattle,’ and on first reading I saw it as a parent-to-infant exchange. But it could certainly also be lover-to-beloved, and I now prefer that reading: two grown-ups who ‘aren’t unique [but] are extreme’ in their use of gabble, babble, cluck, squawk—loving noises that ‘[bubble] up from the pure inane’ in which the lovers express themselves to each other. I’ve confessed often that I’m a sucker for love poems, and I fall completely for the narrator’s expressed desire for ‘decades more to kneel beside / your spring and gulp down emptiness.’ Eschewing grown-up punctuation and capitalization suits the message, and it prompts me to remember that Cummings, the great non-capitalizer, also wrote movingly about love.”

The $1,000 prize also entails a featured reading at The Hyla Brook Reading Series and a full scholarship to attend the Frost Farm Conference. Previous featured readers in the Hyla Brook Reading Series include Richard Blanco, Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Maxine Kumin, Linda Pastan, and Sharon Olds. You can read the full announcement and Christopher’s poem on the Frost Farm website.

Christopher Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (Penguin Classics), a Times Literary Supplement and Australian Book Review Best Book of 2024. He has been an NEA Translation Fellow, and his work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Smartish Pace, Literary Matters and Best American Poetry. Childers holds a BA in Classics from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is a recent transplant to Los Angeles, where he teaches Latin.