With special thanks to the Hartford Friends of Wallace Stevens, we proudly announce that a Hartford Public Schools student has earned the Wallace Stevens Student Poetry Prize, a $1,000 scholarship for postsecondary education.
Our winner is Jennetsy Rodriguez, a senior from University High School of Science and Engineering. The scholarship is awarded each spring to a high school junior or senior, who resides in the city of Hartford. The scholarship is awarded based on a sample of poetry submitted. Jennetsy will be invited to read a couple poems on June 20, 2026 in Elizabeth Park as part of the Hartford Friends of Wallace Stevens' annual Rose Garden Reading event.
You can read Ms. Rodriguez' original poem here:
The Final Giving
Do not confine me to a box of pine,
Or seal my spirit in a sterile tomb.
Let no cold needle trace a synthetic line,
To preserve the shell within a velvet gloom.
Cast me to the wild, to the hungriest teeth,
Let the carnivore taste the life I held in trust.
Then comes the beetle from the soil beneath,
To break the marrow and to reclaim the dust.
The scavenger descends with wings of night,
The crow, the raven, and the vulture’s kin;
They carry my essence into morning light,
So that their fledglings may anew begin.
I am not lost, I am but returned to bloom,
A cycle woven in the emerald blade.
Dissolved in earth, I leave no hollow room,
Only the debt of life, gracefully repaid.