Our judge, Barbara Edelman, has selected a winning sonnet, offering these comments:
How unlike winter hath this season proved” makes rich use of the sonnet tradition. The archaic “hath” in the title/first line reaches back to subvert Elizabethan tropes to suit a contemporary context—one in which the change of seasons evokes not only the bloom and death of love, but also the dying of the planet. The “snows of yesteryear" (from François Villon’s fifteenth-century "Ballade des dames du temps jadis") become in this setting the actively melting present of an aberrant winter. I admire the craft of the poem, in which strict adherence to the Elizabethan sonnet form contributes to the poem’s scope and to its ecological perspective.
Sonnet: How unlike winter hath this season proved 
How unlike winter hath this season proved!
The brilliant snows of yesteryear are gone—
Trembling, as in a globe with light confetti strewed
To fade on the Cathedral’s golf-green lawn.
So like our love, encased within a bubble
Of my memory—our youthful cheeks aflame,
Shedding our heavy clothes, oblivious to trouble,
Our paradise a wedge of Tower with a cleanser’s name.
The sunsets then were not so wild or red
As now, nor flowers forced to early bloom,
Unless illicit raptures in a scholar’s single bed
Presaged a planet spinning toward its doom.
The birds sing on, planning their fragile nests,
And will be singing when old loves are laid to rest.
Angele Ellis (English '79) on the creation of the sonnet:
The Shakespearean sonnet has been one of my favorite poetic forms since I started dipping into my father's Collected Works of Shakespeare when I was a kid. It was a joy to bring together in this winter sonnet memories of Pitt in the late 1970s—when Towers A, B, and C still bore the nicknames Ajax, Bab-O, and Comet—and contemporary concerns about climate change, also a metaphor for the passage of time. I'm the author of four books. In April of this year, my ekphrastic poem "On the Trail" was chosen for display by the Bellefonte, Pa., Art Museum; in May, I reviewed Alexis Rhone Fancher's collection Brazen for Vox Populi, a daily online journal.
Barbara Edelman—an MFA alumna who recently retired from Pitt's faculty after nearly 30 years of teaching for the Writing, Composition, and Literature programs—is a writer who has published two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry, most recently All the Hanging Wrenches (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022). She is an avid outdoor adventurer, as well as an actor and writer of fiction and drama.