Our readers are always changing — a rotating panel of judges, representing a cross-section of the American poetry community, chooses the winners from submissions postmarked on or before July 1 each year. And a group of qualified screeners meets at CGU’s Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards offices to screen all submissions and select approximately 50 titles for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and 25 titles for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award to forward to the final judges. Here’s our 2025 awards year team:
2025 Director of the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards:
Lori Anne Ferrell, Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Claremont Graduate University, Louis and Mildred Benezet Chair in the Humanities, and Director of Early Modern Studies Program
2025 Screening Committee:
Jeremy Ra, poet and recipient of Morton Marcus Poetry Prize
Ashley Dailey, poet and multimedia artist; PhD student at USC
Jenny Qi, poet and author of Focal Point
2025 Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards Final Judges:
Donika Kelly, poet and associate professor at University of Iowa; author of Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Ellen Bass, poet, writer, and writing teacher; author of Indigo, and winner of The Lambda Literary Award and four Pushcart Prizes
Tomás Q. Morín, poet and associate professor at Rice University; author of A Larger Country, winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize
Divya Victor, poet and associate professor at Michigan State University; author of Curb, winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Major Jackson, poet and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities at Vanderbilt University; author of Leaving Saturn; and winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award