New York, NY (October 16, 2025)—The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce the 2025 winners of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the James Laughlin Award.
“Poetry prizes bring great joy not only to the winning poets, their publishers, and loyal fans, but to a wide readership eager to discover award-winning new titles. The Academy of American Poets takes pride in our vibrant award program that shines a light on exceptional talent at various stages of their careers. We congratulate Fady Joudah on receiving the 2025 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for [...]: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and Diamond Forde on receiving the 2025 James Laughlin Award for The Book of Alice (Scribner Books, 2026),” said Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair of the Academy of American Poets. “We thank our esteemed panelists, some of whom once stood where our winners stand now, for their gifts of time, expertise, and discernment. We look forward to placing these powerful poetry collections into the hands of Academy members and poetry fans across the United States.”
Fady Joudah received the 2025 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding poetry published in the United States in the previous year for [...]: Poems. The award comes with a prize purse of $25,000 and a residency at Glen Hollow in Naples, New York. Judges Hayan Charara, Suzanne Gardinier, and Lisa Olstein noted in their citation:
“In this searing collection, Joudah bends the light of lyric poetry to refract witness to genocide and expansive humanity. Situated in an unbearable present that reaches into both past and future, [...] probes the fractured layers of what it means to inhabit—to accept, deny, be complicit in—an I, a you, a we. [...] may not only be one of the most consequential, beautiful books published last year but will be such for years to come.”
Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Diamond Forde received the 2025 James Laughlin Award for her second book The Book of Alice. The award comes with a cash prize of $5,000 and a residency at The Betsy Hotel in Miami. About The Book of Alice, judges Tyree Daye, Donika Kelly, and Richie Hofmann wrote:
“This book so inventively excavates and reimagines the archive of a family history, not only scouring the tradition of poetic forms but also recipes and census documents, to recover a powerful story that could easily be forgotten to time. It is an ambitious collection that reaches into the past to call forth a freer future. The Book of Alice seeks to build a world in which the dead are loved and argued for. These poems are also animated by a Black hope, which is thick with sincerity, irreverence, and love. Both structurally innovative and tender, this collection asks us to consider anew the possibilities of what a book, a memory, and a heart can hold.”
Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) and The Book of Alice (Scribner Books, 2026). She has received a doctorate in Creative Writing at Florida State University, with a specialization in African American poetics and fat studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.
About the Academy of American Poets:
The Academy of American Poets is a leading publisher of contemporary poetry across the United States. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program. It also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to educators; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, visit https://poets.org/.