To encourage medical students to write meaningful poetry related to health or medicine.
Important Dates
Deadline for submission
Award Announcements
Winning poets must submit a W-9 form prior to the issuance of the award check.
2025 Awardees
Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society is pleased to announce the 2025 winners of The Pharos Poetry Award. Out of 202 submissions, the following were selected as the winners:
First Place — “Letter to the Anatomy Student Who is Assigned My Body” by Rowan Magnuson, T.H. Chan School of Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School
Second Place — “The Photographer” by Kellen Vu, Weill Cornell Medical College
Third Place — “The Patient, The Physician, The Virus” by James Jun-Gyu Hwang, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School
The winner’s poems will be published in the 2025 Autumn edition of The Pharos. Congratulations to all.
The Award
Cash awards of $1,000 for first place; $600 for second place; and $400 for third place. The three winning entries will be published in The Pharos.
Eligibility
Authors must be enrolled in medical schools that have an active AΩA Chapter or Association, but need not be members of AΩA. However, if an applicant is a member of AΩA, he/she must have active status. Only one entry per student.
Requirements
- Poems must be written while the student is in medical school, must be the work of a single author, and must represent original work.
- The poem may be on any subject related to health or medicine.
- The poem must be single spaced, single column, and not exceed two pages of 12-point type with minimum 1-inch margins.
- Please do not include any images or special formatting with the poem.
- The poem must not have been offered to or published by any other journal or entered in any other contest.
- Poems not meeting all requirements will be rejected.
- A committee of the editorial board of The Pharos will review the poems and select the winners.
Questions may be directed to
Libby Appel at studentpoetry@alphaomegaalpha.org
Submission
Alpha Omega Alpha is committed to upholding a high standard of professionalism, compassion and humanism in medicine. Patients should be treated with dignity and their privacy respected. We will not accept submissions to any of our programs that conflict with these values, or contain bigotry, or highly politicized content.
