Hajjar Baban wins 2025 National Poetry Series

We are thrilled to announce that Hajjar Baban has been named one of five winners of the 2025 National Poetry Series. Her manuscript LOW FLYING PLANES was selected by poet Jake Skeets and will be published by Milkweed Editions in August 2026. In addition to publication, Baban will receive $10,000.

Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. Her work appears in publications including Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Poetry Daily, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, where she won the 2025 Poetry Contest, selected by Hieu Minh Nguyen. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, Baban is also a cofounder of the Kurdish Poets Collective. LOW FLYING PLANES is her first full-length book of poems.

Judge Jake Skeets, author of Horses and Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, describes LOW FLYING PLANES as follows:

“I look to experience the world through the lens of a poem. Not because I long to step into another’s shoes, but because I hope for the light to be slanted when and after I read. I want to leave a book of poems altered in some way. Hajjar Baban’s LOW FLYING PLANES stayed with me for weeks after I finished it, and it all began with the rocks. ‘Rocks made in my body / against reason, against beauty,’ Baban writes. This collection proves that poems can hold immense beauty, history, and region, and that if language is to be made whole, if tradition is to be made whole, if memory, if truth, it begins with a book like this. I’m eager for the world to enter this one and emerge on the other side transformed, into a place where words are both nourished and at stake. I’m eager for this poet, for a new voice that asks us to change. It is my honor to introduce this marvelous work.”

 Previous winners published by Milkweed Editions include Games for Children by Keith S. Wilson, selected by Rosalie Moffett, Trangenesis by Ava Nathaniel Winter selected by Sean Hill, I Love Information by Courtney Bush, Ask the Brindled by Noʻu Revilla selected by Rick Barot, Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa, selected by Sally Keith; Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia, selected by Kazim Ali; Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets, selected by Kathy Fagan; feeld by Jos Charles, selected by Fady Joudah; I Know Your Kind by William Brewer, selected by Ada Limón; Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last by Justin Boening, selected by Wayne Miller; Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy, selected by Alex Lemon; Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson, selected by Martha Collins; and Visiting Hours at the Color Line by Ed Pavlić, selected by Dan Beachy-Quick. 

See all previous winners and books here.