Allison Benis White’s most recent collection of poetry, “A Magnificent Loneliness,” is a finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

“I’m thrilled to be included in this list of astonishing writers and their books,” said White, a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. “And I’m grateful for the attention this will garner for my collection, as there are so few stages where books of contemporary poetry are celebrated and honored.”

The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes cover 13 subject categories, including poetry, fiction, and biography. (A novel by White’s UCR colleague Tod Goldberg was nominated in the fiction category.) Winners of all but one of the 2025 prizes will be announced April 17 at an awards ceremony at the University of Southern California.

“Ethereal, airy, and spare at once, ‘A Magnificent Loneliness’ is a dialogue with ghosts,” the publisher writes, adding that White “assembles these pages as an ekphrastic and epistolary record of her solitary journey through loss.”

White is the author of four other books of poetry, including “Please Bury Me in This,” which earned the 2018 Rilke Prize, and “Small Porcelain Head,” which won the 2011 Levis Prize in Poetry and was named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award.

Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and the anthologies “Pushcart Prize XLI” and “Pushcart Prize: XLVII.”