Winners & Finalists

2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry
Award Winner

Roger Reeves
Best Barbarian
W. Norton & Company
Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, among other honors. He is an associate professor of poetry in the English Department at the University of Texas-Austin.

2023 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award Winner

Robert Wood Lynn
Mothman Apologia
Yale University Press
Robert Wood Lynn’s debut collection, Mothman Apologia, was selected the winner of the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and listed by the New York Times in its Best Poetry Books of 2022. His work appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and The Southern Review. A 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, he lives in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry
Award Finalists

Hayan Charara
These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit
Milkweed Editions
Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. His honors include the Arab American Book Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, and the John Clare Prize. With Fady Joudah, he is a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.

Cynthia Cruz
Hotel Oblivion
Four Way Books
Cynthia Cruz is the author of seven collections of poems, including Ruin (2006) and How the End Begins (2016). Hotel Oblivion is her latest. Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in 2019. Cruz is pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the European Graduate School.

Joan Naviyuk Kane
Dark Traffic
University of Pittsburgh Press
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq. Her nine books of poetry and prose have been supported by fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, Brown’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Rasmuson Foundation. She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the United States Artists Creative Vision Award, and the Donald Hall Prize.

Solmaz Sharif
Customs
Graywolf Press
Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs and Look, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has received a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton. She has been published in Harper’s, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and is the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

2023 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award Finalists

Kemi Alabi
Against Heaven
Graywolf Press
Kemi Alabi’s Against Heaven received the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Their works have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, and Boston Review, and they have received fellowships from MacDowell and Civitella Ranieri. As Head of Creativity & Impact at the reproductive justice organization Forward Together, Alabi builds cultural power with organizers and artists.

Aurielle Marie
Gumbo Ya Ya
University of Pittsburgh Press
Aurielle Marie’s Gumbo Ya Ya was selected the winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. She was also named the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year (Poetry). As an essayist, she explores subjects of justice, Blackness, bodies, sex, and pop culture. Marie lives in Atlanta on unceded Muskogee land.

Paul Tran
All the Flowers Kneeling
Penguin
All the Flowers Kneeling is Paul Tran’s debut collection. Their work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from Stanford and the National Endowment for the Arts, Tran is an assistant professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Michael Wasson
Swallowed Light
Copper Canyon Press
Michael Wasson is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Lenore, Idaho. He is the author of the collection Swallowed Light and winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize in 2017 for This American Ghost. In 2019, he was named a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, and in 2018 a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow in Literature.