Poet, Writer, Editor
John Bonanni won the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry for his debut collection of poems, retrovirology (Pitt 2026), judged by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. He is a Cape Cod based writer who serves as founding editor of the Cape Cod Review. His poems have appeared in Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, Southern Indiana Review, Washington Square Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Gulf Coast, and his literary criticism has been featured in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and residencies from AS220 and the John Hay Writers Studio. His research on poetry as an intervention for writing attitudes among learners with severe disabilities can be found in The Graduate Review (Bridgewater State University), and his chapbook, a rotary phone that dings when you move it (Cape Cod Editions), was funded by a matching grant from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod and the NEA, before the NEA was gutted by neofascism.
"When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say... then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else."
— Joy Harjo