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Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Poetry
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes poets who demonstrate exceptional artistry and proficiency and push the boundaries of language and expression. The recipients are poets who excel in their technical skills and evoke deep emotional responses, challenge thoughts, and illuminate new perspectives through their work. The award honors those who contribute to the literary landscape with their unique voices and powerful words.
Award Recipients
Jazzoetry Lives by J. Vern Cromartie
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
A Glowing Gateway
The Soundless Symphony is a collection of poetry that covers themes of inner fracture, romantic ache, fantasy realms, and the wonders of the natural world. Why was this an important collection for you to share?
After writing from a place of instinctive emotion and creation, I wanted to reveal the experience to other readers to feel, reflect, and interpret in their own way. The collection is varied in its themes but still emotionally and atmospherically coherent. It’s also open enough to invite rather than to only tell.
I understand that ambiguity will circle the collection because of such an approach, but I see it as a glowing gateway rather than a path of darkness. Although I do accept that ambiguity can be a trap for writers as well as a tool, yet it’s often the readers that decide which one you chose and whether it was successful.
I do enjoy the deep aspects of such an approach which allows for thinkers and wild imaginations, all the while still holding shape and intention. It’s also an intent that I hope to share with my readers.
Are you someone who writes from inspiration, discipline, or a combination of both?
Definitely more from inspiration, though that can be as frustrating as it is wonderful at times. Yet that very nature and unpredictability of creativity are what make the gift of creation so rare and special.
Often, as with many writers, my work carries my influence of life experiences. I do believe inspiration needs a tide to carry the ethereal muse.
Although I naturally lean towards the lyrical as my voice is innate in that sense, I still really appreciate the depth and soft interpretation that vivid imagery leading from that instinct encourages. I feel it gives you the ability to weave both feeling and seeing into verse which endures in a lingering and atmospheric way.
Mythological and fantasy elements appear throughout the collection. What draws you to those worlds?
I love to read about the Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, and mythical creatures just as much as I love to read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and faerie lore.
The myths and legends often hold elements of human nature, morals, and sometimes hard-earned truths. At the same time, the other-worldly essence that lingers in the stories and their golden threads gives them a glittering allure that draws and holds my gaze. They allow both the glimmer of reality and escapism of fantasy to intertwine, and that is something that has always fascinated me.
If readers could take away one message from the collection, what would you hope it would be?
For me, I would say it’s about seeing the truth often veiled, whether by ugliness, beauty, silence, or sound. As for the readers I feel each deserves to reach for and to find their own inspiring message.
This is the first and opening volume. Poems of lost innocence, yearning, and the beauty that masks the truth and turmoil beneath. It is the beginning of the seeking journey, preparing to step into the later darkness. As with life, the feelings and messages are bound to change.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
These poems move between the earthly and the ethereal, touching fragments of myth, hidden emotions, and memory’s quieter corners, bringing to light lostinnocence, yearning, beauty, and turmoil.
With imagery both tender and haunting, capturing the unspoken music of human experience,
The Soundless Symphony is the first volume in A Seeking Soul, a trilogy exploring transformation through myth, feeling, and the night.
Tracing Lines
Tracing Lines is a poetry collection about learning to see life as a set of sacred, intersecting paths: through nature, grief, homesickness, prayer, memory, and ordinary hilarity. Lori Hershberger moves between the mountains and rivers of Thailand, the prairie winds of Kansas, the ache of leaving and returning, and the steady presence of faith beneath it all. The book begins with the idea that human creativity is a kind of tracing, not creation from nothing, but a grateful following of lines already given. That image holds the whole collection together. Whether she is lying small in a cradle of pine needles, watching floods swallow roads and homes, missing the “little white mother” across the world, or laughing over stolen cheese and Sunday Smarties, Hershberger keeps returning to the same quiet conviction: to notice deeply is to be alive.
What I liked most about this collection is how emotionally unguarded it feels without becoming shapeless. The poems have a devotional core, but they’re not thin or merely comforting. Grief is allowed to be strange, physical, even morally uncomfortable, as in “Some Other Person’s Grief,” where the speaker admits the frightening selfishness inside her first prayer after a motorcycle accident. That moment stayed with me because it’s so human. Hershberger is at her strongest when she lets beauty and sorrow touch without smoothing either one down. In “Mothwings,” the rains bring the earth back to life just as death arrives from the other side of the world, and the broken wings on the porch become almost unbearable in their delicacy. I felt that same hush in “Delta 7850,” where lost hours on a flight become minutes mingled with tears in “God’s bathroom cabinet.” It’s a risky image, almost oddly domestic, but it works because it makes heaven feel intimate rather than ornamental.
The writing itself is lush. Hershberger loves repetition, personification, rivers, wind, dusk, birds, and the long ache of distance, and I admired the musical confidence of that recurring language. When the concrete detail anchors the lyric impulse, the work sings. I loved the yellow cat beside the coffee, the cabbages tumbling from trucks in Mae Hong Son, the mother slowly spelling love into a text message, the farmhouse phone of the past ringing into static. Those details make the larger spiritual ideas feel earned. The humor in the final section also surprised me in the best way. After so much ache and altitude, “Life” with its goats, ants, spilled lemonade, and stubborn picnic blanket feels like a deep breath from someone who knows that joy is not the opposite of sorrow, but one of its bravest companions.
Tracing Lines felt to me like a book written by someone who has lived with two homes in her body and has learned to make poetry from the pull between them. It’s tender, sincere, sometimes ornate, often beautiful, and most memorable when it trusts small things to carry enormous feeling. I closed it with the sense of having been invited to look harder at my own ordinary lines, the weathered ones and the golden ones alike. I’d recommend this collection to readers who enjoy faith-inflected poetry, nature writing, reflective poems about place and belonging, and work that treats grief with reverence while still leaving room for cats, mangoes, and laughter.
Pages: 121 | ASIN: B0GTGCT8Y7
Learning to Trust My Voice
Mouthy is an intimate poetry collection in which you write from the layered experience of being Black, queer, femme, soft, and often misread. What was the biggest challenge you faced in putting together this poetry collection?
The biggest challenge was allowing the collection to be honest without over-explaining itself. So much of MOUTHY comes from the experience of being misread before I even open my mouth. Blackness gets misread. Femmeness gets misread. Softness gets misread. Queerness gets misread. I had to resist the urge to defend every part of myself on the page.
I wanted the poems to have teeth, humor, tenderness, and grief, but I did not want the book to feel like I was begging to be understood. The challenge was learning to trust my voice enough to let it stand. Some poems are loud. Some are wounded. Some are funny because laughter has always been part of how I survived. The work was bringing all of those selves into one room and letting them speak without apologizing.
Softness appears repeatedly as a source of strength rather than fragility. What drew you to that idea?
I think I was drawn to softness because I spent so much of my life watching people treat it like a weakness. Growing up Black, queer, femme, and Southern, softness often felt like something I was supposed to hide or harden into something more acceptable. But the older I get, the more I understand that softness is not the absence of strength. Sometimes softness is the thing that keeps you human.
For me, softness is the ability to still love, still feel, still create, still laugh, and still reach for beauty after the world has tried to make you smaller. That is not fragile to me. That is powerful. MOUTHY is very much a collection about reclaiming the parts of myself I was taught to shrink.
The prose piece about returning to your small town is especially restrained and reflective. What was it like to write about a place that shaped you so deeply?
Writing about my small town required a lot of care. I did not want to write it as a villain, because the truth is more complicated than that. The place that hurt you can also be the place that made you funny, observant, stylish, spiritual, careful, and strong. Erin, Tennessee shaped my ear, my humor, my fear, my longing, and my understanding of silence.
That piece had to be restrained because returning to a place like that is not always dramatic on the outside. Sometimes the drama is internal. It is in what your body remembers. It is in the roads, the churches, the family names, the rooms where nobody said what everyone knew. Writing it meant honoring the child I was there while also recognizing the adult who survived long enough to look back.
What do you hope readers who may not share your experiences nevertheless understand after reading the collection?
I hope readers understand that being seen is not a small thing. For people who live at the intersections of race, queerness, gender expression, body, class, and place, being misunderstood can become a daily weather. It shapes how you move, how you speak, how you love, and how safe you feel taking up space.
But I also hope they understand that MOUTHY is not only about pain. It is about voice. It is about humor. It is about beauty. It is about refusing to disappear. Even if a reader has not lived my exact experience, I hope they recognize the human desire underneath it: the need to be loved without translation, without apology, and without having to become smaller first.
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A poetry and reflection collection for anyone who was told they were too much—too loud, too soft, too sensitive, too honest— and learned to shrink in order to survive.
Written in lyrical prose, affirmations, and guided selfreflection, Mouthy explores what it means to find your voice after years of silence. It speaks to the ache of being misnamed,
misunderstood, and asked to make yourself smaller for the comfort of others. Through themes of identity, softness, survival, and self-return, this book invites readers to unlearn the belief that quiet equals safety and volume equals danger.
Rooted in Black, queer, and femme lived experience, Mouthy is both deeply personal and widely resonant. It moves between poetry and prompts, confession and encouragement, tenderness and defiance. Each section offers space to breathe, to write, to remember who you were before the world told you how to be.
This is not a book about becoming fearless. It is about becoming honest.
Mouthy speaks to those who have learned to armor their gentleness, who have rehearsed apologies for things that were never wrong, and who are ready to stop negotiating their worth. It honors the versions of ourselves that stayed quiet to stay alive—and gently releases them from that burden.
This book is for readers who love contemporary poetry, healing literature, and introspective writing that sits at the intersection of self-growth and self-expression. It is for those navigating identity, reclaiming confidence, and learning to take up space without apology.
Mouthy is not asking you to shout. It is inviting you to stop disappearing.
Come as you are. No smaller.
Go in Peace
Go in Peace by Theodore McDowell is a poetic memoir of grief, trauma, faith, and long, difficult healing, centered on the speaker’s beloved sister Rachel, called Sis, whose life is shaped by childhood abuse, artistic brilliance, mental illness, addiction, and suicide. The collection moves through remembered sanctuaries and wounds: the Magnolia tree where two children hide above their parents’ violence, fireflies cupped like magic lanterns, Rachel singing “500 Miles” as an anthem of escape, her letters from Carnegie Mellon, the smoky ache of Blind Willie’s Jazz Club, and the unbearable aftermath of an empty bottle on a nightstand. What emerges is not simply a portrait of loss, but a sustained act of witness, one that tries to honor Rachel’s beauty without softening the brutality that helped destroy her.
McDowell understands sorrow as something cyclical, bodily, almost liturgical, returning through waves, snow, jazz riffs, cemetery paths, and remembered rooms. The strongest poems are the ones that allow contradiction to breathe. Rachel is guardian angel and wounded child, rebel and scapegoat, artist and sufferer, mythmaker and mortal. The speaker’s love for her is tender, but it’s not sentimental. He admits guilt, rage, spiritual confusion, even moments of cruelty, such as the devastating scene in which fear and exhaustion overtake compassion outside Rachel’s darkened house. That honesty gave the collection its moral weight for me. I trusted it because it didn’t ask me to admire grief from a safe distance. It asked me to sit inside its weather.
The writing is lush, biblical, and intensely image-driven, sometimes to the point of saturation. McDowell’s imagination repeatedly returns to water, fire, bruises, birds, ash, snow, and sacred music, and those recurring images give the book a powerful internal music. At its best, the language feels rhythmic. A rainstorm becomes creation, a cemetery becomes a place where shade writes forgiveness in the dirt, and Canada geese in winter become evidence that beauty still exists. This is a book written from overflow, from someone trying to find a form large enough to hold the sister he lost.
Go in Peace is a harrowing and compassionate collection about what it means to survive the dead without abandoning them. I finished it with the sense that McDowell had not conquered grief so much as learned to carry it differently, turning Rachel’s memory from a wound into a living presence, a festival of lights moving downriver. I’d recommend it to readers drawn to confessional poetry, spiritual memoir, trauma narratives, and literary works that wrestle honestly with family violence, suicide, forgiveness, and faith after devastation.
Pages: 142 | ASIN: B0GS5RHS3S
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Poetry
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes poets who demonstrate exceptional artistry and proficiency and push the boundaries of language and expression. The recipients are poets who excel in their technical skills and evoke deep emotional responses, challenge thoughts, and illuminate new perspectives through their work. The award honors those who contribute to the literary landscape with their unique voices and powerful words.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Careless Whispers
Careless Whispers by Oquirrh Keyes is a raw and confessional poetry collection about desire, secrecy, power, betrayal, and the slow, brutal process of reclaiming the self after an affair built on half-truths and emotional control. The book moves from the first spark of a D/s relationship, through rituals like shared songs, cuffs, coffee, hidden online personas, and charged meetings, into the painful unraveling of lies: the wife, the matching details, the dating apps, the parking lot goodbye. It reads less like a neat narrative and more like memory sorting itself after impact.
I was struck by how bodily this book feels. Keyes writes in fragments, but the fragments have heat in them. A mud-soaked day at Bonneville becomes both romance and omen. A cuff becomes proof, then a noose, then something quietly pried loose with pliers. A pot of chili, a family Christmas photo, a shared location bubble, even a nickname given to a child, all become evidence of how intimacy can invade ordinary life until nothing feels untouched. I liked that the poems don’t pretend the speaker was only a victim or only a strategist. She wants, she plays, she notices, she returns, she leaves, and then she returns again. That honesty gave the collection its ache.
The writing is best when it trusts a small image to carry the damage. The dandelions and clouds poem, for instance, has a lovely quietness after so much fire, and the Oquirrhs section gives the speaker a landscape large enough to heal inside. I also appreciated the recurring visual language of keys, cuffs, screens, watches, cars, and mirrors. It gives the book the feeling of a private exhibit, each object labeled by pain. The repetition of accusation and revelation can feel blunt, but I think that bluntness is part of the book’s temperament. It isn’t trying to be coy. It’s trying to name the thing that nearly erased her.
Careless Whispers is intimate and steady. It has a pulse that feels earned, especially as the speaker moves from obsession toward self-possession. I’d recommend it to readers who like emotionally candid poetry about toxic love, erotic power, betrayal, and recovery, especially those who appreciate confessional writing that’s messy, sensual, wounded, and unwilling to lie about what longing can cost.
Pages: 152 | ASIN: B0GWB24MN6
Poems of Yosemite
Poems of Yosemite is a meditative collection by Charles Weeden that gathers decades of walking, aging, wondering, grieving, and returning into the granite-lit world of Yosemite and the High Sierra. The poems move through places like Shadow Lake, Half Dome, Garnet Lake, Rush Creek, Donahue Pass, Camp 4, and Cathedral Peak, but the real subject is inward travel: memory, mortality, faith, wilderness, and the strange way a landscape can become a person’s moral and spiritual compass. Weeden writes as someone who has not merely visited Yosemite, but been formed by it, from the youthful tent facing Tissiack to the older hiker crossing Donahue Pass and asking whether he is “the hiker or passenger.”
What I liked most is the book’s sincerity. It’s unguarded in a way that feels increasingly rare. In “Shadow Lake,” the speaker revisits a place from forty years earlier and finds not just scenery, but a confrontation with his younger self. That struck me as one of the collection’s deepest emotional chords, because Weeden understands that returning to a beloved place doesn’t freeze time, it reveals time. The mountains remain, but the self has altered. I also found “Tissiack’s Tears” genuinely moving, especially in its idea of the “unhalf,” the unlived life that appears in the reflective water. That’s the sort of image that lingers because it’s both simple and devastating. The best poems here don’t just admire nature, they let nature answer back, sometimes tenderly, sometimes without mercy.
Weeden can be lush, philosophical, playful, and blunt, sometimes all within the same handful of pages. I admired the ambition of poems like “Garnet Lake” and “Below Cathedral Peak,” where the ideas widen into questions about purpose, God, beauty, and existence. The diction gets a little heavy with abstraction, especially when the poems lean into philosophical naming, as in “Darwin and Dasein” or “Selectionist Proclaim.” I really liked the pieces rooted in physical experience: drinking from a Sierran stream, hearing the river’s voice, watching tourists in Crocs misunderstand a bedraggled hiker at Happy Isles.
I felt I’d spent time with a person trying to make peace with wonder, age, doubt, and gratitude, and that gave the collection a quiet cumulative force. Poems of Yosemite is warm and personal. Its best moments feel like sitting beside someone at dusk while they point to a ridge and tell you what it has meant to them over a lifetime. I’d recommend it to readers who love Yosemite, hikers who think as much as they walk, and anyone drawn to reflective nature poetry that treats wilderness not as escape, but as a place where the soul is patiently, sometimes painfully, returned to itself.
Pages: 56 | ASIN : B01MZ8E9S7
