PhD Student Nica Giromini Franklin's "Hostile Architectures" Wins Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Contest

May 19, 2025

We are delighted to announce that UC Berkeley English PhD student Nica Giromini Franklin's collection of poetry, Hostile Architectures, has won the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Contest. We offer our congratulations to Nica on this honor!

Nica Giromini Franklin's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Bat City Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley.


Learn more about Omnidawn's annual poetry contests here. 

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The style of this book lives in the lineage of negative theology, the unsaid. Celan-adjacent with a postmodern death of vocabulary. The ordinary kept strange by the restriction of the voice. The title predicts a deft consistency in the manuscript, which refuses to move because it can’t move.
Citation from Contest Judge Katie Peterson