Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry Winners

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.

Poetry
Jennifer Huang

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.

Poetry
torrin a. greathouse

Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive.

Gatekeeper: Poems book cover
Poetry
Patrick Johnson

Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.

Poetry
Claire Wahmanholm

Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm.

Poetry
Caitlin Bailey

Inspired by the mysterious and intense relationship of the Trakl siblings, Solve for Desire is a keening exploration of desire between brother and sister, poet and subject, the living and the dead.

Tula
Poetry
Chris Santiago

Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016...

Beautiful Zero
Poetry
Jennifer Willoughby

Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is filled with explosive wit and humor. Yet even at their most surreal—whether taking as their subject a Kaiser Permanente hospital, Shark Week...

You Must Remember This
Poetry
Michael Bazzett

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. The winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a...

Glass Armonica
Poetry
Rebecca Dunham

The winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry probes the depths of the human psyche. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic—from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud’s famed...

Odessa
Poetry
Patricia Kirkpatrick

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in this collection fighting for her life. The winner of the 2012 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry creates from loss a dreamlike reality: Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once...