Tupelo Press to publish Cameron’s second poetry collection, VIRGA

Tupelo Press to publish Cameron’s second poetry collection, VIRGA

Hey, everyone,

I hope you are staying safe and well. I’m excited to share that my second poetry collection, VIRGA, will be published by Tupelo Press in 2028, with distribution from The University of Chicago Press’ CDC. And, no, I haven’t moved to Bellingham 😉 The below is from the Tupelo Press announcement this week.

Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge Deborah Paredez has selected VIRGA by Cameron McGill of Bellingham, Washington as winner of the 2025 Helena Whitehill Book Award.

Here’s what Jeffrey Levine, Artistic Director of Tupelo Press, writes:

In VIRGA, Cameron McGill presents a collection of remarkable composure and depth, distinguished by its sustained attentiveness to family, memory, illness, and the ethical weight of love. These poems inhabit thresholds—between generations, between the physical body and its fragilities, between belief and doubt—with a clarity that emerges from restraint rather than resolution. Grounded in the textures of ordinary life—kitchens, hospital rooms, rural roads, domestic interiors—the work opens outward toward cosmological and metaphysical inquiry, allowing the personal and the universal to remain in active, resonant tension. McGill’s formal control is matched by emotional risk: the language is precise, musical, and lucid, yet permeable to grief, wonder, and tenderness. Throughout the manuscript, silence is granted as much authority as statement, and lyric attention becomes an act of moral witnessing. VIRGA is a cohesive and mature book of rare quiet power, deserving of recognition for its intelligence, its emotional integrity, and its lasting beauty.

We offer our sincere congratulations to Cameron McGill, and as well, to every finalist and semifinalist. This was an especially rich and rewarding group of manuscripts!

I will keep you posted on pre-orders next year; in the meantime, several poems from the book can be read in the following journals. love. cameron.