2026 Kingsley Tufts Poetry
Award Winner
Jennifer Chang
An Authentic Life
Jennifer Chang’s An Authentic Life was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her other books include Some Say the Lark and The History of Anonymity. She has received the William Carlos Williams Award, the Library of Virginia Award in Poetry, the Levinson Prize from Poetry, and fellowships from the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
2026 Kingsley Tufts Poetry
Award Finalists
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
I Don’t Want to Be Understood
Jennifer Espinoza is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks), There Should Be Flowers, and I Don’t Want To Be Understood (Alice James Books), which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry and the Leslie Feinberg Award. Her work has been featured in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, MoMA Magazine, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently resides in Los Angeles.
Rosa Lane
Called Back
Rosa Lane is the author of Called Back, winner of the 2025 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry (Tupelo Press, 2024); Chouteau’s Chalk, winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2019); Tiller North, winner of the 2017 NIEA Poetry Book Award (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016); and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook funded by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission. Her most recent work won the Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, was named Best of Poetry for the Geminga Prize, and was selected as a finalist for the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. She has appeared on Maine Public Radio and the podcast Poetry Medicine for the Soul. Her latest project explores the transformative power of poetry writing with queer youth. She resides in coastal Maine.
Octavio Quintanilla
The Book of Wounded Sparrows
Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets (University of Arizona Press, 2025). He is the founder and director of the literature and arts festival VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University and was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Greg Rappleye
Barley Child
Greg Rappleye’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized. In addition to Barley Child, which concerns his Irish-American family, he is the author of four other poetry collections, including A Path Between Houses (2000), Figured Dark (2007), and Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds (2018). His honors include the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin, a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Greensboro Review Prize in Poetry, and many more. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and the University of Michigan Law School. He served for 26 years as Corporation Counsel for Ottawa County, Michigan, and spent 25 years on the faculty of the English Department at Hope College. In May 2026, he will be a featured reader at the Cork International Poetry Festival in Ireland. He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.
2026 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award Winner
Eduardo Martinez-Leyva
Cowboy Park
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrants. He is the author of Cowboy Park (University of Wisconsin Press), which won the 2024 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for First Book of Poetry, and a Lambda Literary Award. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, The Slowdown, Best New Poets, Poetry, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, and held a Teaching Fellowship at Columbia University, where he earned his MFA. He teaches and resides in Los Angeles, California.
2026 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award Finalists
Chaun Ballard
Second Nature
Chaun Ballard’s chapbook Flight was the recipient of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and was published by Tupelo Press, and his full-length collection Second Nature received the 23rd Annual A. Poulin, Jr. Prize and was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2025. His writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Obsidian, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Atlantic, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The New York Times Magazine, and other literary magazines. He holds an MFA and a PhD.
Elly Bookman
Love Sick Century
Elly Bookman is the author of Love Sick Century, winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She has received the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review. She writes and teaches in her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia.
Steven Duong
At the End of the World There is a Pond
Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego, California. He is the author of the debut poetry collection At the End of the World There Is a Pond (W. W. Norton, 2025). His poetry and short fiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Short Stories 2024, The Drift, Guernica, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University and an editor of short fiction at Joyland Magazine. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Stephanie Niu
I Would Define the Sun: poems
Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. Her debut full-length poetry collection I Would Define the Sun won the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Survived By (Host Publications, 2024) and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.