Photo by Nabila Wirakusumah

Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipina American writer. Her debut, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, won the Trio Award and is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2025. A Saltonstall fellow, a Sewanee scholar, a Tin House Summer Workshop alum, and a Community of Writers alum, her work can be found or is forthcoming in Narrative, AAWW, Mercury Firs, Honey Literary, Couplet, Beloit, Copper Nickel, Adroit, and elsewhere.

Winner of the 2024 Trio Award, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet explores nonlinear landscapes of grief, desire, and identity. This debut poetry collection revolves around love and loss (parents, family, friends, childhood, pets, the environment), while confronting the fracturing and inescapable presence of absence and longing.

Artwork sampled from Ginny Benson // VX Bliss