In 2021, Howard County Poetry and Literature Society launched the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize in honor of its founding member, Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Now in its forth year, contest judges evaluated many submissions for mechanics and technique, clarity, style/music for our contemporary age, imagery/sensory power, and emotional resonance. Congratulations to this year’s winner, Mickie Kennedy and the poem “Aubade With Peaches, Eggs, and Hissing Garlic.” Judges shared they appreciated the rich, incisive sensory language; skilled technical precision and powerful restraint within the form; and deep emotional resonance of this both contemporary and timeless love poem. Read on to learn a little about the winning poet and to hear the poem recited.

Tell us about your poem “Aubade With Peaches, Eggs, and Hissing Garlic”. How did it come about? What sparked or inspired it?

Last year, I took a virtual poetry class (“Food in Poetry”) taught by Melanie Tafejian. She offered weekly prompts, and the first draft of this poem was actually a response to a prompt where she challenged us to write about being in the kitchen with somebody else. In further drafts, the poem found its way inside its current shape: a meditation on the surprise of domesticity, as the speaker (recently out of the closet) resists an easy togetherness he never thought he’d have.

What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

When I was five, quite new to reading, I kept encountering a mysterious phrase: off ice. On a walk through town: off ice. On drives with my Grandma: off ice. In winter and summer, night and day. I knew what ice meant. I knew what off meant. But off ice was a door I couldn’t pass through. I asked my Grandma what it meant, and she wasn’t sure. “Stay off the ice?” she guessed, but it was summer, so hot we kept the windows down. A few days later, while Grandma was gassing up the car, I saw the word again, painted on the side of a building. “There it is!” I said, pointing. Grandma looked, and then laughed and laughed. “That’s not off ice,” she said, “That’s office, a place where people work.” And just like that, language grew strange. Slippery. Opaque. A site of transformation. A place to hide.

As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?

My animal avatar would have to be a tardigrade, which is an eight-legged micro-animal. They’re rugged survivalists, more prolific than roaches, and they can withstand hostile environments, under extreme conditions of lack, for literal decades by entering a death state, then springing back to life when the conditions soften. They’re also called mossy pigs. So much to love. And I channeled their resilience, moving through the hostile environment of my childhood.

Tell us about a writer or a book that you return to over and over for inspiration.

Richie Hofmann’s A Hundred Lovers. Lithe. Sensual. Brimming with crystalline images that refract the world back cleaner, somehow. And more strange. I’ll be reading this book for years.

What are you working on next and where can we find you?

“Aubade With Peaches, Eggs, and Hissing Garlic,” is from a manuscript called Worth Burning (my first book!), which is set to be published in February 2026 by Black Lawrence Press. So I’ll be promoting that project till the mossy pigs come home! You can find me on social media platforms @MickiePoet. Or visit my website: https://mickiekennedy.com.

Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and elsewhere; his first book of poetry Worth Burning will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026. Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.