Allison Benis White’s most recent poetry collection, “A Magnificent Loneliness,”  was awarded the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

“I’m over the moon,” said White,  a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. “This recognition of ‘A Magnificent Loneliness’ is what writers dream about. And I’m grateful to represent UC Riverside, and our Creative Writing Department, with this honor.”

A finalist for the prize in poetry, White learned she had prevailed in the category at an awards ceremony held April 17 at the University of Southern California. (Recipients in other genres, such as biography and fiction, were also announced.)

The ceremony served as a prelude to the 31st annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. White read from “A Magnificent Loneliness” at the two-day event, where nearly a dozen other UCR faculty and alumni authors spoke on panels and signed books.

In White’s citation for the prize, the judges call her poetry collection “a transformative meditation on grief, love and art making.

“The musical phrasing of line, stanza, poem soothe, steady and move readers visually and emotionally through each of the wondrous sections of the book, showing us ‘What is alive between us.’”

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.”