New York, NY (October 8, 2026)—The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce Harryette Mullen as the recipient of the 2026 Wallace Stevens Award, which recognizes outstanding artistic achievement over a poet’s career and carries a stipend of $100,000. The Academy is also proud to honor Tim Seibles with the 2026 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement and carries both a stipend of $25,000 and a residency at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Mullen and Seibles were selected by the Academy’s Board of Chancellors, an elected group of distinguished poets from across the United States. Both poets will be honored at the Academy’s annual Chancellors Reading on Friday, October 16, at the Guggenheim New York, where they will join the Chancellors for an evening of poetry.
“What a delight it is to celebrate Harryette Mullen and Tim Seibles at this year’s Chancellors Reading among the poets who selected them for two of our highest honors,” said Academy of American Poets President and Executive Director Robert Casper. “They join an august lineage of honorees: Stevens Award winners include Rita Dove, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich; Gwendolyn Brooks, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Claudia Rankine are former Academy Fellowship recipients.”
2026 Wallace Stevens Award Citation
Academy Chancellor Gabrielle Calvocoressi said, “Harryette Mullen has spent over thirty years committed to the rigorous, luscious, and ravishingly ferocious work of making poems that refuse easy categorization and bring us to the thrilling edges of what language is capable of. Mullen’s deep engagement with OULIPO has modeled the way in which poetic play, in its most inventive capacity, can help us interrogate how we ourselves are complicit in and subject to the relentless games of capitalist consumption. Like Gertrude Stein, Mullen’s curiosity and belief in the transcendent possibility of the everyday create a poetry that proves the avant-garde is often located right beneath our noses and in the juxtaposition of simple details that we often overlook. In an interview with the poetry podcast Time Lost Mullen says, ‘We can’t know everything. But somehow I had a bug in my bonnet that I had to know more and more and more and more. So I kept writing more and more and more.’ That bug in the bonnet has, for decades, shown that ecstasy, tragedy, and the luminous quotidian are endless sources of poetic possibility for Mullen and all of us who walk, wrestle, dicker, and dream. The Wallace Stevens Award is a testament to an extraordinary life in poetry and to the profound gift Harryette Mullen has given to readers around the world.”
2026 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Citation
Academy Chancellor Patricia Smith said, “Tim Seibles believes that poetry is the most powerful way of saying no to the minimization of our spirits and hearts, and yes to the possibilities of gigantic powers within us. The beautiful power. The sweet power. But also the wild, unleashed, often unnameable power. For every second of his creative life, he has strained against boundary and presumption, crafting a bold idiosyncratic signature far outside of any quaint little box one dares imagine could contain him.
“He has infused the Road Runner and Coyote and Boris and Natasha with breath and whimsy; he has clawed beneath the surface of loneliness and loss to hear how their shadows sing in a Black man’s body; he has growled the gravel soundtrack of speakeasies, brown liquor and the question of snug red skirts; he has tweaked the prim stature of villanelles and sonnets, straining their seams with his rollicking, irresistible, often impolite lyric. His masterwork, One Turn Around the Sun, boldly meets us where we and the poet find ourselves—confounded by a world intent upon suppressing the thrumming of the solitary heart—and his urgent stanzas pull us close, clasp our hands, instruct us in the reclamation of light.”
About Harryette Mullen
Harryette Mullen is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Regaining Unconsciousness (Graywolf, 2025); Urban Tumbleweed (Graywolf, 2013); Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002), a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry; and Recyclopedia (Graywolf Press, 2006), which received a PEN Beyond Margins Award.
Known for her inventive uses of language, wordplay, and allusion, Mullen draws on traditions of African American writing and representations of Black women in her poetry. Her work has been recognized for its engagement with language, identity, and culture.
Mullen is a recipient of the 2009 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Her other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2023, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mullen currently teaches African American literature and creative writing in the English department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read more about Harryette Mullen: https://poets.org/poet/harryette-mullen
About Tim Seibles
Tim Seibles is the author of eight poetry collections, including With No Hat (Etruscan Press, 2026); Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2022); One Turn Around the Sun (Etruscan Press, 2017); and Fast Animal (Etruscan Press, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of both the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Poetry.
Seibles’s poetry explores the complexities of human experience, drawing on the language of everyday life to examine love, identity, race, and social justice. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets (Little, Brown, 2024), edited by Kwame Alexander, and Best American Poetry in 2010, 2013, and 2023.
Seibles’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Most recently, Seibles has written poems for two monuments: one in Norfolk, Virginia, dedicated to the Norfolk 17, a group of African American students who desegregated Virginia’s public schools, and another for an installation in Dallas addressing the city’s history of race-based lynchings.
Seibles served as the poet laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018 and taught in the English department and MFA writing program at Old Dominion University for more than twenty years before retiring. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia. Read more about Tim Seibles: https://poets.org/poet/tim-seibles
About the Chancellors Reading
The Academy of American Poets will honor Mullen and Seibles at the 2026 Chancellors Reading on Friday, October 16, at the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the Guggenheim New York. The evening will feature readings by members of the Academy’s Board of Chancellors and the two award recipients. For more information, visit https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/programs/chancellors-reading.
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/.
Photos of Mullen and Seibles are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ouzC4ebBO611zisAMZg_rX2Wo1r-u0eH?usp=sharing
For more information and press requests:
Peggy Ryan
Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications, Academy of American Poets
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