Past YAPA Winners

Explore the YAPA prompts and winners of previous years below.

YAPA 2025

The prompt for the 2025 Young Armenian Poets Awards in Honor of Tamar Asadourian asked entrants to consider German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s words regarding what our response to tragedy and crisis and grief might be. He asks, in his poem “Motto,” if “In dark times / Will there also be singing?” to which he responds “Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.”

“There is, initially — for many, I imagine — a certain sense of despair that falls like a curtain quite immediately when hearing these words, which seem to have made their way into more and more public conversations lately. Who reading this has not felt the light of the world dim in recent times, and, for too many, virtually (and heartbreakingly) extinguish? But there is also that word, singing, that seems to offer resistance and tension. It refuses to give up and feels this innate impulse to identify, through imagination and resolve, that which ails us and, indeed, that which is part of this complicated human condition, no matter how painful the rendering. It’s the voices from both nearby and far away that offer us inspiration. Things can/must get better,” wrote YAPA’s founder and director Alan Semerdjian in his introductory statement for h-pem, that graciously collaborated with IALA for the fifth year in a row.

Follow the links below to read the winning poems and commentary: