The Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Ecstatic Poetry Prize ran its inaugural competition in 2024-2025, as a joint Ecstatic Exchange and Lote Tree Press collaboration. The theme was The Ecstasy of Witnessing. Winning and highly commended poems were announced in March 2025, judged by renowned poets Sukina Noor and Baraka Blue. This book includes the winning entries, highly commended, shortlisted and longlisted entries.

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore (1940-2016, rahimahullah) was a pioneering American Beat-turned-Sufi poet. He authored dozens of poetry collections, in his own ecstatic, thoughtful, and often witty style, fusing Romantic, Surrealist and Sufi influences. Abdal-Hayy’s oeuvre spans sonnets, ghazals, and free verse, covering themes from family, love, death and nature to Mawlid, Hajj, Ramadan, prophets and saints, and more. His poems are a deeply personal prayer and reflection on the Divine perceivable in the everyday. In 2023, the publishing company he founded, The Ecstatic Exchange, published From a Shore Beyond Water: Selected Poems of Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore.

The Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Ecstatic Poetry Prize celebrates poets writing poetry infused with Islamic spirituality whose impact on the reader is one of illumination, joy, and a return to the heart. It spotlights poetry that demonstrates proficiency of literary craft and attunement to the relationships between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, written mainly in English but including multilingual poems.

Understanding that the path to joy is often fraught with hard-earned lessons, it welcomes submissions that deal with difficult topics in an honest, vulnerable way, while suggesting spiritual lessons gleaned from them. We looked for poetry entries that echoed, in the poets’ own ways, Abdal-Hayy’s expression of the ecstasy of witnessing the Divine, and conveyed spiritual wisdom learned personally in the human realm. A sense of humour went a long way, too!

Cover artwork Whirling Arabesque by Lateefa Spiker