2025 Winner: Zoe Darsee

We are very pleased to announce that Zoe Darsee has been selected as the 2025 winner of the Tom La Farge Award. The committee holds that Zoe's work and community practice carries forward Tom La Farge's vision of serious play and democratic outreach. The award will help to build up the in-house printing studio at TABLOID Press and produce a new series of poetry pamphlets. 

Zoe "Zack" Darsee is a poet, publisher, teacher and performer. They are the author of the chapbook BELL LOGIC (Spiral Editions), and two pamphlets Efflorescence in Stucco (Earthbound Press) and Anzündkind (Creative Writing Department). They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, where they were the recipient of the Hazo Poetry Prize for their long poem What to do about the wife. More of their recent poetic work can be found online and in print at Blush Lit, Tagvverk, Annulet, Community Mausoleum, Works & Days and Grotto Journal. 

Their first full-length book, From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson, a collaborative novel written with Elise Houcek, is forthcoming from Inside the Castle in Fall 2025. "A lysergic neo-noir poet's novel," it was written in word-for-word alternation by its two authors, who will be in residence at the Art Farm to develop multimedia works that extend the world of this novel into material and sculptural manifestations. 

Darsee is also co-founder and co-editor of TABLOID Press, a publishing initiative grounded in the poetics of the local, begun in 2014 in Berlin, Germany. Experimental and constraint-based poetry workshops are a foundational part of their practice, and are held in various arrangements of community as well as at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.  They live in Berlin, Germany, with their little dog Billie. You can find out more about them at zoedarsee.com, or on instagram here.