New York, NY (December 15, 2025)—Reading a poem daily is a small act with a profound impact. As part of its efforts to bring the transformative power of poetry to a growing readership every day, the Academy of American Poets announces the 2026 Guest Editors for Poem-a-Day, its signature series featuring new work by today’s poets. Poem-a-Day serves 315,000+ subscribers and reaches an even broader audience each day via Poets.org, email, podcast, and social media, making it one of the most-read poetry publications and a major presenter of new voices in the literary field.
Since 2018, the Academy of American Poets has invited twelve Guest Editors each year to curate a month of Poem-a-Day, the original and only daily poetry series dedicated to sharing previously unpublished poems by today’s poets. The twelve Poem-a-Day Guest Editors for 2026 reflect the extraordinary breadth of contemporary poetry, bringing together internationally celebrated poets, former Academy Chancellors, major award recipients, poet-critics, translators, memoirists, and cultural leaders whose work spans lyric, narrative, experimental, and public-facing traditions. Throughout the year, each Guest Editor will curate poems that speak to intimacy and inheritance, grief and survival, imagination and justice, offering readers a dynamic range of voices shaped by lived experience and artistic rigor.
Poem-a-Day presents new poems by contemporary voices every weekday; on weekends, the series features classic poems from the Academy’s online collection accompanied by brief critical commentary. Each month, a Guest Editor curates Poem-a-Day by selecting poems and inviting a range of poets, both established voices and emerging writers, into conversation with readers. Each weekday entry presents a new poem by a featured poet chosen by the Guest Editor, accompanied by an audio recording of the poet reading their work, a short biography, a link to their most recent or forthcoming book, and an “about this poem” statement written by the poet.
“Poem-a-Day is not only the Academy’s largest program but also arguably one of the most vital publishing platforms in American letters,” said editorial director Mary Sutton. “It is one of few literary outlets in which both new poets and U.S. poets laureate are able to share their work with a vast audience, with everyone receiving equal air time. The ritual of engaging with a poem each day is one shared by readers from all walks of life and across generations—a testament to the importance of poetry in American cultural life. It is the Academy’s honor to work with these twelve Guest Editors, each of whom will share with readers poems that highlight their unique ideas about the art form. It is also our honor to share this new, never before published work with millions of readers each year at no cost to them, underscoring the Academy’s commitment to literary access.”
Readers can sign up to receive Poem-a-Day directly in their inboxes at poets.org/poem-a-day.
The 2026 Guest Editors and their months of curation are:
January: Geffrey Davis
Geffrey Davis is the author of three books of poetry: One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024); Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Legacy/Zora Award in Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation, Davis is a core faculty member in the Rainier Writing Workshop’s low-residency MFA program and serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. He lives in the Ozarks and teaches in the University of Arkansas’s program in creative writing and translation.
February: Chris Abani
Chris Abani is the author of several poetry collections, including There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), illustrated by Percival Everett, and Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Abani is also the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin Publishing Group, 2014); Song for the Night (Akashic Books, 2007), a PEN/Beyond Margins Award winner; and GraceLand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), winner of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. With Chancellor Emeritus Kwame Dawes, he coedited Kumi: New-Generation African Poets (Akashic Books, 2024), a chapbook set. Abani’s other awards are the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Edgar Prize, a USA Fellowship, the UNT Rilke Prize, a Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Formerly a professor in the department of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, Abani is currently a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Board of Trustees Professor of English and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University.
March: Danusha Laméris
Danusha Laméris is the author of three books of poetry: Blade by Blade (Copper Canyon Press, 2024); Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), part of the Pitt Poetry Series, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry; and The Moons of August (Autumn House Press, 2014), chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. A Pushcart Prize recipient, Laméris was also selected for the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award in 2020. As the 2018–20 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, Laméris cofounded The Hive Poetry Collective—a radio show, podcast, and event hub. She is on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program and leads the Litfield Writers Community.
April (National Poetry Month): Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux is the author of nearly a dozen poetry collections, most recently Life on Earth (W. W. Norton, 2024), which was long-listed for the National Book Award. She is also the author of the textbook Finger Exercises for Poets (W. W. Norton, 2024). She is the coauthor, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1997). Laux’s numerous other honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Oregon Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have been translated into Afrikaans, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, and Romanian. In 2020, Laux was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has taught in the University of Oregon’s program in creative writing and in the MFA program at North Carolina State University, where she remained until her retirement in 2022.
May: Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan is the author of five books of poetry, including The Moon that Turns You Back (Ecco, 2024 and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award. She is the author of the novels The Arsonists’ City (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Alyan is also the author of the memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025). Her other honors include a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. She works as a clinical psychologist in Brooklyn, New York.
June: Sam Sax
Sam Sax the author of Pig (Scribner, 2023); Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award; and Madness (Penguin Books, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series. They are also the author of the novel Yr Dead (McSweeney’s, 2024), which was long-listed for the 2024 National Book Award. Sax has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary, MacDowell, Stanford University, and Yaddo. They are also the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion.
July: Oliver Baez Bendorf
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster (Nightboat, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award, and the Lambda Award for Transgender Poetry, and named a Best Poetry Book of 2024 by both Electric Literature and Literary Hub. His earlier collections are Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019), winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Prize, and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015), selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and CantoMundo, and the winner of the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from Publishing Triangle. In 2025, facing political persecution in the United States, Baez Bendorf chose exile and now lives and writes by the sea.
August: Charif Shanahan
Charif Shanahan is the author of two books of poetry: Trace Evidence: Poems (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, and Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing: Poems (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry / Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Shanahan is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, including a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and residency fellowships from Cave Canem, Hawthornden, La Maison Baldwin, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Shanahan is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.
September (National Translation Month): Maya C. Popa
Maya C. Popa is the author of If You Love that Lady (W. W. Norton, 2026); Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022), named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry; and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), a runner-up for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, judged by Ocean Vuong, and winner of the North American Book Prize in 2020. She has also received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Oxford Poetry Society. Popa is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, where she teaches and oversees all literary programming for poets and prose writers.
October: Lorna Dee Cervantes
Lorna Dee Cervantes is the author of several poetry collections, including Sueño: New Poems (Wings Press, 2013); Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (Wings Press, 2011); and Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), which won an American Book Award. Her work has also been published in hundreds of anthologies, most recently FIRE: Poems Against Pandemic (El Martillo Press, 2026). Cervantes has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. She is a coeditor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal. Cervantes has held faculty positions at Yale University, Vassar College, University of Houston, University of Colorado Boulder, where she taught for twenty years and served as the director of the creative writing program, and the University of California, Berkeley, where she has served as a UC Regents Lecturer in the English department since 2011.
November: Denise Low
Denise Low is the author of more than forty books of poetry, essays, and criticism. Her most recent full-length poetry collections include House of Grace, House of Blood (University of Arizona Press, 2024), winner of the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and Wing (Red Mountain Press, 2021), a finalist for the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award. Low’s works of prose include the memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and Natural Theologies: Literature of the New Middle West (Backwaters Press, 2011), the first critical study of contemporary poets from the Mid-Plains. She also edited Kansas Poems of William Stafford (Woodley Press, 2010). Low is a founding member of the Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) and has served on its national board since 2020. She is also a literary programmer for the arts nonprofit The 222. She served as poet laureate of Kansas from 2007 to 2009. From 2008 to 2013, Low was a board member of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and was its president from 2011 to 2012. She has taught at the University of Kansas, the University of Richmond, and for twenty-seven years at Haskell Indian Nations University where she founded the creative writing program. She currently teaches at Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies in Baldwin City, Kansas.
December: Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is the author of numerous poetry collections, most recently The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022); Stranger by Night (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); and Gabriel: A Poem (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), which was nominated for the National Book Award. He is also the author of several works of nonfiction, including My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025) and A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). Hirsch’s various honors include the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hirsch, a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, was a professor of English at both Wayne State University and the University of Houston. He is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Photos of the 2026 Guest Editors can be found here.
About the Academy of American Poets
Now in its ninety-first year, 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/.