Poetry

Literature

Kevin Young’s Blues, Dante’s Measure, and the Weight of What Stays

Kevin Young won the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize for Night Watch — a collection the judges called his most experimental yet, Blues-tinged and Dante-structured, examining grief and racial legacies in deeply American language.

Authors

At 95, Antonio Gamoneda Still Fears the Future — and That Is What Saves Us

The Spanish poet confesses his deep unease about the future while working on a tribute to García Lorca. Few statements from a living writer have felt more urgent.

Literature

Kevin Young Wins the World's Richest Poetry Prize. Now, Does Anyone Care?

Kevin Young's Night Watch has won the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize, the world's richest poetry award at C$130,000. It is a formally demanding, blues-inflected collection — one that deserves readers who do not need a prize to find it.

Reviews

Ern Malley Never Existed. His Poems Did. Does That Matter?

In 1944, two Australian poets invented a dead poet named Ern Malley to prove that modernism was a fraud. The scandal arrived on schedule. But the poems turned out to be too good to be just a joke.

News

An American Poet Wins the Dylan Thomas Prize — and the Question It Leaves Behind

Sasha Debevec-McKenney has won the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize. The result says something about the current state of English-language poetry — though perhaps not what the prize's Welsh origin might suggest.

Authors

The Frame Before the Sentence: On Ocean Vuong and the Other Language He Speaks

A recent photography exhibition reveals that Ocean Vuong has always spoken two languages simultaneously — the literary and the visual. Literary Hub's profile of the exhibition raises a question worth sitting with: what does the image do that the sentence cannot?

Literature

What It Means to Have Seen: Andrés Neuman's New Poetry

Andrés Neuman's 'Vengo de ver' transforms the current crisis into verse, combining astonishment with resistance in equal measure. A poet who still finds the world surprising — and suspects this is already a form of defiance.

Awards

Marianne Boruch Wins the $100,000 Jackson Poetry Prize — and Why That Matters

Marianne Boruch has been awarded the $100,000 Jackson Poetry Prize for sustained excellence in American poetry. A quiet, essential recognition of a voice that has worked in the margins of literary fashion for decades.

Authors

Patti Smith Wins Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts 2026: Poetry, Punk, and a Prize Long Overdue

Spain's Princess of Asturias Foundation has awarded its 2026 Arts prize to Patti Smith, 79, for her "impetuous creativity that connects rock, symbolist poetry and the spirit of the counterculture." In October, Oviedo awaits the godmother of punk.

Literature

An Unpublished Lorca Poem Surfaces — Found by a Flamenco Singer

Miguel Poveda has announced the discovery of an unknown poem by Federico García Lorca, to be published on April 27 in Granada. Nearly ninety years after his death, Lorca keeps finding ways to surprise us.

News

Arthur Sze Reappointed Poet Laureate: Poetry as a Bridge Between Worlds

There is a kind of poet who does not write from a center, but from the space between places. Arthur Sze's second term as U.S. Poet Laureate carries his lifelong project of bridging languages and cultures.

Literature

The Whiting Award Names Ten Emerging Writers for 2026

The Whiting Foundation has announced this year’s ten recipients — fiction writers, poets, essayists, and a playwright — each receiving $50,000. A list worth reading against the backdrop of an industry in upheaval.