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Dear friends,
It is with great pleasure that we share with you the winners of the 2026 Poet of the Year Award.
This year we read through 1,351 submissions — poets writing from everywhere, sending us their most intimate, strange, defiant, and luminous work. I don’t know how or why this is, but each year the pool of poems grows stronger, and with each prize we’re reminded how difficult & delightful this task is. And yet after many hours of endless conversations between Shannan and myself, the winners rose up quite clearly. We’re in the process now of interviewing them, and you’ll soon get to spend time with their voice as our Poets of the Week throughout August. Without further ado:
The $3,000 grand prize winner is:
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POET OF THE YEAR
Sloan Asakura
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Sloan Asakura (she/he/they) is a poet and memoirist from Los Angeles. They have received support from organizations like Periplus Collective, McCormack Writing Center, and Blue Mountain Center. They completed their MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University where they won the 2025 Frances Mason Harris Prize and the 2026 Edwin Honig Memorial Award. They are the winner of the 2024 CRAFT Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. Their work can be found in magazines such as Joyland, BRINK, The Rumpus, and more.
read sloan's poems + interview → august 30, 2026
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And our four finalists, each awarded $500, are:
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INDRANI SENGUPTA
Indrani Sengupta is an Indian American poet and Kundiman fellow. She is the winner of a Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere.
READ INDRANI'S POEMS + INTERVIEW → AUG 2
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RYLER DUSTIN
Ryler Dustin, Ph.D., represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam. He’s the author of Trailer Park Psalms, winner of the University of Pittsburgh’s 2022-2023 Starrett Prize, and Heavy Lead Birdsong (Write Bloody, 2008), forthcoming in an expanded edition this fall. He lives in Bellingham, WA with a dog he met while hiking.
READ RYLER'S POEMS + INTERVIEW → AUG 9
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TAYLOR BYAS
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native and award-winning poet. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, among others. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), was a September 2025 pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club.
READ TAYLOR'S POEMS + INTERVIEW → AUG 16
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MATTHEW BUXTON
Matthew Buxton is a queer writer from Salt Lake. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and his work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, The Iowa Review, Chicago Review, and more. He's been recognized by the Vermont Studio Center, McCormack Writing Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. He now lives in Chicago.
READ MATTHEW'S POEMS + INTERVIEW → AUG 23
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For the full shortlist, please go here. We’re overjoyed to celebrate these five poets, and can’t wait for you to read their work. Congratulations to them, and our deepest gratitude to everyone who sent us poems this year. This prize exists to honor poets and bring their work to more readers, and it is your readership & support that makes it possible. I hope you’ll find time in your busy lives for their poems throughout the next month, and support them & send them words of appreciation.
With love and excitement,
Karan
If this inspires you to send work to us for our next prize, we are currently open for the $2000 Bob Hicok Fellowship, with Bob himself as our final judge! (Still feels unreal!)
Remember that you can send previously published poems for this one. We look forward to finding our next fellow.
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Send us a portfolio of poems that'll make us lose our minds. Submit now to the $2000 Bob Hicok Fellowship. Open to all poets writing in English, living anywhere in the world. All submissions are considered for publication. Final judge is Bob Hicok himself. Winner receives funding + year-long support for their writing & career. Full guidelines details here
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