2025 Alumni Poetry Award Contest Winners – by Mark Johnson - '83
Saints held its highly anticipated 2025 Junior Class Poetry Contest this week, captivating students, faculty, and alumni with powerful expressions of personal growth, community, and brotherhood. Sponsored by the St. Augustine Alumni Association, the contest is a cherished annual tradition that provides students with an opportunity to share their creative voices. This year’s theme, “Personal Growth in the Brotherhood,” encouraged young poets to explore the strength of camaraderie, faith, and mutual support, both within the school and beyond.
What sets this contest apart is not only its rich tradition, but also its embrace of innovation. Recognized as one of the most technologically advanced high school poetry competitions in Southern California, the 2025 edition featured two competitive categories: Original Work and Artificial Intelligence Enhanced. While the Original Work category honored poems composed entirely by students without the aid of technology, the AI-Enhanced category challenged students to use artificial intelligence as a creative partner, emphasizing thoughtful collaboration over automation.
In the Original Work category, winners were chosen for their exceptional creativity, emotional depth, and ability to capture the contest’s central theme. 1st Place was awarded to Maurice Howard for his heartfelt poem “Home,” 2nd Place went to Cristiano Shores for “A Feeling of Brotherhood,” and 3rd Place was earned by Jacob Washington for “To Fight.” These poets impressed the judges with their insight, clarity, and genuine reflections on brotherhood and faith, demonstrating the enduring power of the written word.
The AI-Enhanced category highlighted a growing frontier in creative expression, where students used iterative processes to shape and humanize AI-generated suggestions. The judging panel for this category included three accomplished St. Augustine Alumni and two AI systems, ensuring a well-rounded evaluation that considered both emotional resonance and technological sophistication. The winners were: 1st Place – Kenneth Michalowski for “Forged in Flame,” 2nd Place – Dominic Cresto for “Iron Sharpens Iron,” and 3rd Place – Peter Thorn for “Mornings.” Each poem reflected a harmonious blend of human ingenuity and digital assistance, pushing the boundaries of what poetry can be in a modern world.
The contest’s submission process followed rigorous guidelines to ensure fairness and originality. All poems were submitted anonymously, and entries in the Original Work category were subject to AI detection, with any poem scoring above 30% flagged for review. AI-Enhanced entries were judged not just on literary quality but also on how effectively students guided the AI to produce meaningful, human-centered work. This approach ensured that technology served as a tool for creativity, and not a replacement for it.
Winners from both categories were honored at the school’s end-of-year awards rally, where they received cash prizes generously provided by the Saints Alumni Association. First-place winners received $150 each, second-place winners $100, and third-place winners $50.