National Poetry Series Winners

Poetry
Courtney Bush

I Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, is a vigorous examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which.

Poetry
Noʻu Revilla

Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.

Poetry
Devon Walker-Figueroa

Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.

Poetry
Benjamin Garcia

Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.

This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men. 

Poetry
Jos Charles

This National Poetry Series winner defiantly makes space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. These poems stake a claim on the language available to speak about trans experience. 

Poetry
William Brewer

Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, this National Poetry Series winner is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids in rural Appalachia.

Mothers masquerading as witches and sepulchral bellhops who reveal themselves to be fathers: in these poems, nothing is as it seems. Shot through with mournfulness, gorgeously spangled in its language, this National Poetry Series winner...

Poetry
Nancy Reddy

This National Poetry Series winner follows the multiple transformations—both figurative and literal—that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. From Nancy Drew to Cinderella, the familiar yet surprising speakers of...

Poetry
Sara Eliza Johnson

A handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. This National Poetry Series winner pulls shards of tenderness—and a transformative, regenerative force—from a world...

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But where—asks this intense and ambitious National Poetry Series winner—is the Color Line in the mind, in the body...