New York, NY (October 21, 2026)—The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that Dior J. Stephens has received the 2026 James Laughlin Award for their forthcoming second poetry collection, ATOMIC I (Nightboat, 2027).
Offered since 1954, the James Laughlin Award recognizes and supports a second book of poetry forthcoming in the following calendar year. Stephens will receive a $5,000 cash prize and an all-expenses-paid, weeklong residency at The Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. The Academy will also distribute copies of the winning book to its members.
“For almost three quarters of a century, the James Laughlin Award has celebrated the promise of a poet’s second collection,” said Academy of American Poets President and Executive Director Robert Casper. “Dior J. Stephens’s ATOMIC I adds to the great work this award has honored with its innovative fusion of history, culture, and identity—structured around the atomic bomb tests.”
Judges Anastacia-Reneé, Sherwin Bitsui, and Patrick Rosal wrote in the citation:
“With boundless literary experimental form and rich imagery, ATOMIC I, by Dior J. Stephens is a poetically explosive interrogation of the usage of ‘I’ and the plurality of our singular decisions in a fragile and fractal world. The book’s language is both fission and fusion, percussive in its sonic dimension, and concussive with all its simultaneous trembling. These poems investigate the ‘I’ as a dimension of both revelation and concealment.”
Dior J. Stephens is the author of two poetry collections: ATOMIC I (Nightboat, 2027) and CRUEL/CRUEL (Nightboat, 2023), a 2024 Ohioana Book Award finalist. His work has also appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry Daily and Poet Lore.
A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Sewanee, and Lambda Literary Foundation, Stephens was also a 2026 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He is the coeditor-in-chief of Foglifter Journal & Press.
Stephens lives in Cincinnati, on the unceded land of Osage, Shawanwaki (Shawnee) Peoples.
About the Judges
Anastacia-Reneé is a writer, interdisciplinary educator, and multimodal artist. She is the author of Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2024); Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2023), named one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2023 and one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of 2024; Forget It (Black Radish, 2017); and (v.) (Black Ocean, 2017). As a playwright, she has written and directed Talking with the Lorde: A Choreopoem, Not My Size, 9 Ounces, and Queer Mama Crossroads. She is the recipient of Artist Trust’s James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award for Literature and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Anastacia-Reneé has received fellowships and residencies from numerous institutions, including Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Ragdale, 4Culture, Artist Trust.
Sherwin Bitsui is the author of three poetry collections: Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018); Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 PEN Open Book Award; and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003). His honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship, a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, and a Whiting Writers’ Award. Bitsui has taught in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is an associate professor of creative writing at Northern Arizona University. He served as the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in November 2019.
Patrick Rosal is the author of five poetry collections: The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems (Persea Books, 2021); Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016), winner of the 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Boneshepherds (Persea Books, 2011); My American Kundiman (Persea Books, 2006); and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books, 2003). He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri, and the Fulbright Research Program. His other honors include the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. Rosal is a distinguished professor in the MFA program at Rutgers University–Camden and has led the ecopoetics community initiative Quilting Water through his role as campus director for the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.
About the Academy of American Poets
Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the largest poetry membership organization in the United States. Each year, the Academy awards more than $1.3 million to 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; organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to educators; hosts public poetry programs 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/.
A photo of Stevens is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MJOvtk-vqTQD8sGabz5WJ7ukbCxByyPL/view?usp=sharing
For more information and press requests:
Peggy Ryan
Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications, Academy of American Poets
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(646) 470-2405