New York, NY (August 6, 2026) —The Academy of American Poets announced today that it will award $50,000 each to twenty-two poets serving as poets laureate in cities, counties, states, and Tribal communities across the United States. In addition, the Academy will provide a total of $81,000 in matching grants to fourteen local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations collaborating with laureates on their work.
The Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowships recognize laureates’ literary excellence while enabling them to undertake meaningful and innovative projects that enrich the lives of community members, including youth, through responsive and interactive poetry activities.
“Poets laureate bring poetry out into public life, where language can help people feel less alone and more connected to one another,” said Robert Casper, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets. “We are honored to support these twenty-two poets laureate as they create meaningful projects for their communities, and we are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its continued partnership in making this work possible.”
Since 2019, the Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowship program has bolstered laureateships across the United States. The Academy has awarded $8.75 million in fellowships to 171 poets laureate, plus more than $620,000 in matching grants to secure project support from 93 local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations.
The recipients were recommended by an adjudication panel that included Nandi Comer, award-winning author and 2024 Michigan Poet Laureate Fellow; Dennis Nangle, senior program officer at the Institute of Museum and Library Services; Naomi Shihab Nye, winner of the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award and Academy Chancellor Emerita; Shin Yu Pai, 2023–24 Civic Poet of Seattle and visual artist; and Lynne Thompson, 2021–22 Los Angeles Poet Laureate and board chair of Cave Canem.
2026 Poet Laureate Fellows
- Crisosto Apache (Colorado)
- nicole v basta (Tompkins County, New York)
- Michelle Bitting (Pacific Palisades, California)
- Lady Brion (Maryland)
- Brenda Cárdenas (Wisconsin)
- Antonio De Jesús López (San Mateo County, California)
- Mayda del Valle (Chicago, Illinois)
- Kathleen Driskell (Kentucky)
- Manuel González (New Mexico)
- Justin Hamm (Missouri)
- Danielle Hanson (Costa Mesa, California)
- Raina J. León (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
- Genny Lim (San Francisco, California)
- Moira Magneson (El Dorado County, California)
- Erin Malone (Bainbridge Island, Washington)
- Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah (Boston, Massachusetts)
- Logan Phillips (Tucson, Arizona)
- Kevin Prufer (Texas)
- Derek Sheffield (Washington)
- Jake Skeets (Navajo Nation)
- Lee A. Tonouchi (Hawaiʻi)
- Mark Turcotte (Illinois)
About the 2026 Poet Laureate Fellows and Their Projects
Crisosto Apache, Poet Laureate of Colorado
Project Description
Following the 2026 release of an anthology featuring Colorado’s ten poets laureate, Crisosto Apache’s project seeks to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the state’s laureate program through the publication of a recurring series of volumes showcasing poetry from youth under the age of eighteen, representing every county in Colorado. By partnering with local Colorado presses, the initiative seeks to strengthen the state’s literary infrastructure while providing a professional platform for young, diverse voices. Beyond fundraising, the project aims to decentralize Colorado’s literary focus away from the Front Range, or its urban corridor, tasking the poet laureate with engaging smaller, underserved communities. Each subsequent volume will introduce new perspectives, fostering a continuous and inclusive narrative of the state’s cultural landscape.
About Crisosto Apache
Crisosto Apache is an Indigenous (Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné) poet. He is the author of three poetry collections, including is(ness) (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2026). He is the recipient of numerous honors, including The Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and the Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Residency. Apache works as an associate professor of English and creative writing at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and serves on the board for The Offing magazine. He lives in Lakewood, Colorado, on Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Ute land, and is the eleventh poet laureate of Colorado.
nicole v basta, Poet Laureate of Tompkins County, New York
Project Description
nicole v basta will lead poetry workshops with adult and teen community members. Participants will engage with the topic of water, the history of local waterways, particularly Cayuga Lake, and the very present and pressing environmental threats to the region’s water and environment, including the potential impact of a planned artificial intelligence data center on Cayuga Lake’s east shore. These workshops will culminate in the publication of an anthology of poems written by the community and printed by a local press, with cover art by a local artist. Its publication will be celebrated with a reading, book launch, and large community gathering. Funds raised through the sale of the anthology will support efforts to stop the TeraWulf data center from being built on Cayuga Lake and also go toward an environmental organization focused on education. This project will aim to gather community members of diverse backgrounds, both from the urban part of Tompkins County and rural areas, as well as those from the Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ (Cayuga Nation) diaspora, with the aim of reimagining the possibilities of poetry and conceptualizing new futures that recenter the environment.
About nicole v basta
nicole v basta is a poet, community educator, arts events producer, and visual artist.She is the author of the chapbooks V, selected by Rigoberto González as the winner of The New School’s annual contest, and the next field over (Tolsun Books, 2022). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares and the Best New Poets anthology.Her work has been supported by numerous organizations, including Art Farm Nebraska, Monson Arts, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and Terra Cultura. In 2025, Basta was appointed the poet laureate of Tompkins County, New York.
Michelle Bitting, Poet Laureate of Pacific Palisades, California
Project Description
Michelle Bitting will conduct a series of multi-session residencies at designated schools on the west side of Los Angeles with youth affected by the 2025 Palisades-Eaton fires. The residencies will begin in the fall of 2026 and end in the spring of 2027. Guest poets will join Bitting in conducting two major residencies in the fall and two more in the spring. Each residency will culminate in the creation of an anthology of poems written by the students and a reading event. Bitting will help guide young writers discover the light and healing power of poetry.
About Michelle Bitting
Michelle Bitting is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Ruined Beauty (Walton Well Press, 2026).The recipient of the City of Los Angeles (COLA) 2026–27 Independent Master Artist Projects Grant, Bitting was commissioned by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for the 2024 Paris/Los Angeles Cultural Olympiad. Her other awards include the Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize, the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Prize, and the DeNovo Prize from C&R Press.
Bitting has taught as a California Poet in the Schools for ten years and led creative writing workshops at Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Downtown Los Angeles for two years through PRISM Restorative Justice. Since 2018, she has worked as a senior lecturer in creative writing and literature at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where she lives on the unceded land (Tovangaar) of the Tongva people. In 2012, she was appointed poet laureate of the Pacific Palisades.
Lady Brion, Poet Laureate of Maryland
Project Description
Lady Brion, in partnership with renowned spoken word poets Kenneth Something and Slangston Hughes, will finish the first edition of “Elements of Poetry,” an innovative workbook designed to teach specific approaches to producing spoken word poetry. “Elements of Poetry” narrows poetry into four distinct writing styles and believes every writer of poetic expression has two elements that they naturally use—a primary and a secondary strength, or organic style and overall approach as a writer. In this unique workbook, each poetic element is clearly identified, and readers are supported with writing techniques to harness primary and secondary elements, or explore the remaining elements to expand and diversify their writing style. This text will serve as both an anthology of phenomenal poets representing the four styles that are present in spoken word as well as a guide to help the reader become a better poet. In addition to publishing “Elements of Poetry,” the authors will conduct a local tour, performing and hosting workshops to help students master the various elements and create new works.
About Lady Brion
Lady Brion is an international spoken word artist, activist, organizer, and educator from Baltimore. Throughout her slam career, she has won the 2016 and 2021 National Poetry Slam, the 2017 and 2019 Southern Fried Poetry Slam, and the 2019 Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam. In 2021, she became the Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion. Lady Brion currently serves as the founder and executive director of the Black Arts District. In 2024, she was appointed as the poet laureate of Maryland, making her the youngest poet laureate in Maryland’s history and the only spoken word artist to hold this position.
Brenda Cárdenas, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin
Project Description
Brenda Cárdenas’s ekphrastic youth project will, in conjunction with her larger Wisconsin Poet Laureate project for which she is holding ekphrastic relays between poets and visual artists in seven regions, teach eight, free three-day workshops for middle and high school students. She will teach one workshop in each major region of the state and two in Milwaukee, where students will produce ekphrastic poems inspired by works of visual art. Students will create visual pieces (e.g., drawings, paintings, collages, etc.) inspired by their writing and that of their peers. These poems and artworks will become part of Cárdenas’s larger laureate project, and for each region’s workshop, she will produce a saddle-stitched chapbook anthology for each workshop participant. In each region, she will partner with arts and literary organizations that provide youth programming to help her gain access to public schools and libraries where some of the workshops will take place.
About Brenda Cárdenas
Brenda Cárdenas was born in Milwaukee. She is the author of several chapbooks, two edited anthologies, and the full-length collection Boomerang (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2009). She has collaborated with musicians, composers, visual artists, and choreographers. In 2023, her poem “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros,” set to choral music by Daniel Afonso, was published by Hal Leonard Music, and in 2024, performed by the National Concert Choir at Carnegie Hall.Cárdenas served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2012. In 2014, the Library of Congress recorded a reading of her work for their spotlight on U.S. Hispanic writers. In 2024, she became professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she was awarded the Outstanding Woman of Color in Education Award. She has been teaching creative writing and U.S. Latinx literatures for seventeen years. In 2025, Cárdenas was appointed the poet laureate of Wisconsin.
Antonio De Jesús López, Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California
Project Description
Antonio De Jesús López’s “One County Under Bars” brings poetry into the places where it is likely kept out—the jails of San Mateo County. As poet laureate, De Jesús López leads trauma-informed writing workshops inside Maple Street Correctional Center, in partnership with the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office. The workshops offer a space for participants to write, to be heard, and to reclaim authorship over their own stories. The project culminates in a published anthology with Paloma Press, entering participants’ voices into the county’s permanent cultural record. Through the fellowship, De Jesús López will support participants’ writing as they move to reenter society and bring the anthology to print. Its publication will be accompanied by public readings that will seek to return these voices to the community.
About Antonio De Jesús López
Antonio De Jesús López is the author of The Right to Remain Violets (University of Arizona Press, 2027) and Gentefication (Four Way Books, 2019), selected by Gregory Pardlo for the Levis Prize in Poetry.
De Jesús López’s other honors include a 2018 Marshall Scholarship, a Pushcart Prize, and designation as a 2025 Obama Foundation USA Leader. De Jesús López served his hometown of East Palo Alto as a city council member and mayor from 2020 to 2024 and currently serves as poet laureate of San Mateo County through 2027. He is a codirector of research at the nonprofit Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS).
Mayda del Valle, Poet Laureate of Chicago, Illinois
Project Description
Mayda del Valle will create a one-week spring break poetry camp serving thirty Chicago Public School (CPS) students in grades 7–12 during March 2027. The camp responds to a gap in youth programming by providing free, high-quality literary arts programming that centers creativity, community, and access. Open to CPS students and youth engaged in existing poetry programs across the city, the program will take place in downtown Chicago and create a sense of belonging and give young people an opportunity to tell their stories. Led by two Chicago Poetry Center Poets in Residence, the camp will include daily poetry workshops and student support through transportation, meals, and participation stipends. In addition to building writing skills, the program will create opportunities for cross-city connections among young people from different neighborhoods, schools, backgrounds, and experiences. The week will culminate in a public reading where participants will share original poems with family, friends, and community members, followed by the production and distribution of a chapbook featuring student work. The program centers the stories and voices of young people while supporting creative expression, self-advocacy, confidence, and social-emotional skill building.
About Mayda del Valle
Mayda del Valle is the author of A South Side Girl’s Guide to Love and Sex (Tia Chucha Press, 2017) and The University of Hip Hop (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Del Valle began her career at Nuyorican Poets Café , where she was the 2001 Grand Slam Champion, and went on to become the National Poetry Slam Champion in the same year—the youngest and first Latin person to do so. She went on to appear in six episodes of the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and was a contributing writer and original cast member of the Tony Award–winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Del Valle’s work has been featured in numerous publications, and she has performed at venues worldwide, including a 2009 appearance at the White House by invitation of President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.In 2024, Del Valle was awarded the Letras Boricuas Fellowship from the Flamboyan Arts Fund and the Mellon Foundation, and in 2025, received a Dark Matter Residency from Elastic Arts Foundation in Chicago. Del Valle has taught poetry in schools, colleges, and youth detention facilities, and served as program director of Street Poets in Los Angeles. She is currently the poet in residence at The Chicago Poetry Center. In 2026, Del Valle was appointed as the second poet laureate of Chicago for a two-year term. She is currently developing a multimedia spoken word performance piece titled Herencia , exploring the story of Puerto Rican migration to Chicago’s South Side.
Kathleen Driskell, Poet Laureate of Kentucky
Project Description
Kathleen Driskell’s Pine Mountain State Resort Park Kentucky Poets Laureate Trail in southeastern Kentucky features the work of former Kentucky state poets laureate with strong ties to Appalachia, offering a diverse representation of the region’s literary culture while bringing poetry to underserved communities and visitors to Kentucky’s historical “first” state park.
About Kathleen Driskell
Kathleen Driskell is an award‑winning poet, essayist, and teacher. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Goat‑Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025). In 2025, she received a Pushcart Prize for her essay “Church of the Goat Man,” originally published in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative .From 2019 to 2022, Driskell served as board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). She is a professor of creative writing and chair of the Naslund‑Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, where she also serves as editor in chief of Good River Review. In addition, she sits on the editorial board of the University Press of Kentucky.In 2025, Driskell was appointed poet laureate of Kentucky through 2026. She lives in Louisville.
Manuel González, Poet Laureate of New Mexico
Project Description
Manuel González will expand Voces de la Tierra , a statewide poetry initiative that brings spoken-word performances, writing workshops, and community storytelling opportunities to tribal nations, rural communities, libraries, and schools throughout New Mexico. Central to the project is a cohort of six young, Indigenous poets who will serve as youth poetry ambassadors, traveling with González to share their work, engage local youth, and demonstrate the power of poetry as a tool for cultural expression, identity, healing, and connection. Through performances, interactive workshops, community open mics, and a growing digital poetry archive, the project will amplify underrepresented voices, increase access to the literary arts, and foster meaningful connections across the diverse communities of New Mexico.
About Manuel González
Manuel González is a poet, educator, and community organizer. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Duende de Burque: Albuquerque Poems and Musings (University of New Mexico Press, 2021).
González currently teaches creative writing, journalism, and speech at Native American Community Academy in Albuquerque. He also facilitates community-based writing workshops throughout the state of New Mexico. In 2025, González was appointed the poet laureate of New Mexico through 2028. He lives in Albuquerque.
Justin Hamm, Poet Laureate of Missouri
Project Description
The Missouri Poet Baseball Cards project is Justin Hamm’s main initiative as Missouri Poet Laureate, an all-Missouri expansion of his Poet Baseball Cards series that celebrates poets connected to the state through collectible baseball-style cards paired with a free online curriculum styled around “fantasy baseball.” Each featured poet receives a card with biographical and literary “stats,” while the accompanying classroom materials turn the card into an entry point for reading, writing, discussion, and discovery. The project is designed to make Missouri poetry feel accessible and alive to Missouri students.
About Justin Hamm
Justin Hamm is the author of five books of poetry, including O Death (Spartan Press, 2024). He is also the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and the founding editor of the museum of americana . In 2022, he delivered a performance titled “The American Midwest: A Story in Poems” at TEDx Oshkosh. In 2019, his poem “Goodbye, Sancho Panza” was studied worldwide as a part of the World Scholar’s Cup curriculum. Hamm’s honors include receiving the St. Louis Poetry Center’s 2014 Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Award. For more than two decades, Hamm has served as an English teacher and librarian in Missouri public schools. He currently works as an elementary school librarian in Mexico, Missouri, where he lives. In 2025, he was appointed as poet laureate of Missouri through 2027.
Danielle Hanson, Poet Laureate of Costa Mesa, California
Project Description
Danielle Hanson’s Sidewalk Poetry Project is an interactive public art initiative designed to imprint poems into city parks’ sidewalks. The project embeds short poems into sidewalks whenever new concrete is poured, allowing residents and visitors to encounter poetry in public parks around Costa Mesa while creating a permanent literary presence in the community and making poetry accessible for all.
About Danielle Hanson
Danielle Hanson is the author of three poetry collections, including The Night Is What It Eats (State University of New York Press, 2026). She also coedited Objects in this Mirror: An Anthology of Legacy (Press 53, 2025) with Julia Beach, as well as two books of literary criticism. Hanson served as guest editor for Codhill Press and marketing director for Sundress Publications. She has been poet in residence at Arts Beacon in Atlanta, where she curated the poet-artist collaboration show Alloy , and writer in residence for Georgia Writers. The writer in residence at the University of California, Irvine, she is a professor of the practice in creative writing at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2024, Hanson was appointed as the inaugural poet laureate for Costa Mesa, California.
Raina J. León, Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Project Description
Raina J. León’s Treasured: A People’s Archive is a citywide poetry initiative grounded in memory work as a form of civic resistance and care. The project insists that diverse peoples, intergenerational histories, and ancestral stories are not peripheral to the nation’s past or future, but central to collective survival. By reclaiming the past through poetry and archives, Treasured maps strength, resilience, and brings imagination forward. In this project, linguistic diversity and access is also central to outreach; it actively seeks representation in historically marginalized Philadelphia communities.
About Raina J. León
Raina J. León is the author of three poetry collections, including sombra : (dis)locate (Salmon Poetry, 2016)A member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and Macondo, as well as The Writers Grotto and The Ruby, both in San Francisco, León has received fellowships and residencies from numerous arts institutions, including the Obsidian Foundation, Montana Artists Refuge, MacDowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. In 2025, she was named a Letras Boricuas Fellow.A founding editor of The Acentos Review , León is a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern Maine and lives in Philadelphia, on Lenni Lenape ancestral lands. In 2026, she was appointed the poet laureate of Philadelphia through 2027.
Genny Lim, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California
Project Description
Genny Lim’s “Words Without Walls,” a multi-generational, community-building project explores cross-disciplinary responses to poetry. Participants will discover how the languages of the arts can help free the written word beyond the page in six workshops that will culminate in a performance at the San Francisco Main Public Library featuring Genny Lim, intergenerational poets, and collaborating artists.
About Genny Lim
Genny Lim has translated nearly one hundred poems by Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island under the Chinese Exclusion Act in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (University of Washington Press, 2014), edited alongside Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, which received the American Book Award in 1980 and the 2024 Spirit of Angel Island Award from the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.Lim is also the recipient of two lifetime achievement awards from PEN Oakland and the city of Berkeley, California, as well as a Certificate of Honor from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in recognition of fifty years of public service to the Bay Area arts. In 2025, Lim helped inaugurate San Francisco’s first youth poet laureate cohort program with the San Francisco Public Library, Youth Speaks, and 826 Valencia. She curates the Living Poets Society Reading Series throughout the city’s branch libraries. In 2024, Lim was appointed the ninth poet laureate of San Francisco.
Moira Magneson, Poet Laureate of El Dorado County, California
Project Description
Moira Magneson’s “Wisdom of Watersheds” project will engage students at El Dorado County’s Mountainside Middle College High School in a months-long exploration of the Upper American and Cosumnes River watersheds through poetry workshops, guest speakers, field trips, and a student chapbook.
About Moira Magneson
Moira Magneson is the author of In the Eye of the Elephant (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2025). She is also the author of the novella A River Called Home: A River Fable (Toad Road Press, 2024), illustrated by Robin Center. In 2024, she was the resident poet for the El Dorado–based arts collective ForestSong. Magneson lives in the Sierra foothills where she freelances as an editor and serves as El Dorado County’s fifth poet laureate.
Erin Malone, Poet Laureate of Bainbridge Island, Washington
Project Description
Erin Malone will, in partnership with the Bainbridge Island School District, create and lead workshops for fourth grade students. Considering ideas of home and the natural world, they’ll discuss a bilingual illustrated edition of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions . Students will use Neruda's work as a springboard for their own and make short poems composed of questions about animals, weather, and seasons. Next, Malone will collaborate with local artists and businesses to create a permanent outdoor installation of the children’s questions, where they will be seen by neighbors as well as visitors to the island. There will be both classroom and public celebrations of the poems and the installation during which questions asked by our newest generation of citizens in the form of poetry will be honored with the community’s attention.
About Erin Malone
Erin Malone is the author of four poetry collections, including The Dictionary of Shapes (Poetry Northwest Editions, 2026), a collaboration with visual artist Patricia Sonnino. Malone’s honors include the Robert Creeley Memorial Award and the Coniston Prize, grants from Colorado Council on the Arts and Hugo House, and both fellowship and residency support from Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Monson Arts. Malone has taught in many college and community classrooms, as well as in elementary schools for Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers in the Schools. A former editor of Poetry Northwest , she is currently poetry editor at Okay Donkey and serves as poet laureate of Bainbridge Island in Washington State through 2027.
Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah, Poet Laureate of Boston, Massachusetts
Project Description
Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah will expand on a project initiated by Boston’s previous poet laureate, Porsha Olayiwola. In tandem with the Roxbury Poetry Festival, this year he will establish the Mandela Writing Project, the namesake of a proposed city that would have been formed as a result of Boston’s majority Black neighborhoods (including much of Roxbury) seceding from Boston in the 1980s. Through a collaboration with UMass Boston’s MFA program as well as various writing and poetry-focused organizations within Boston, Oppong-Yeboah will establish and staff this writing retreat, and provide free housing and travel stipends to its participants. The second project involves an expansion of the NorthBeast Regional Poetry Slam & Festival, which brings together adult poetry slam teams from across New England. While it has historically been a two-day event taking place in one centralized location, using project funds it will be transformed into a three-day, district-focused festival that activates two of Greater Boston’s premier cultural hubs and features a new youth track for regional Brave New Voices teams. Across three days, the festival will bridge the Central Square (Cambridge) and Nubian Square (Roxbury) cultural districts, and culminate in finals at the historic Strand Theatre in Dorchester.
About Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah
Born in 1993, Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah is a Ghanaian American poet, editor, and educator living in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of the chapbook not without small joys (Game Over Books, 2022). A finalist for both the Gold Line Press / Ricochet Editions Chapbook Competition and the 2019 Diode Editions’ Book and Chapbook Prize, he has served as a high school English teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and as a teaching artist at organizations such as the Massachusetts Literary Education and Performance (MassLEAP) Collective, Cambridge Arts Council, Northeastern University, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. They are also the school librarian at the Joseph Lee K–8 School in Dorchester. In 2025, they were appointed as Boston’s fourth poet laureate through 2029.
Logan Phillips, Poet Laureate of Tucson, Arizona
Project Description
Logan Phillips’s ¡Somos Uno! (“we are one!”) is a new type of literary offering for Tucson and Southern Arizona: poetry events for those who don’t go to poetry events—and for those who already love them. Organized by Tucson Poet Laureate Logan Phillips, this new series of multilingual, intergenerational, cross-cultural, accessible, exciting encuentros (“community encounters”) and writing workshops brings together poets and storytellers from Tucson’s many dynamic literary communities at unexpected venues across the city. ¡Somos Uno! will provide a series of sparks for the local arts scene, opening space for youth poets to find community and continue the poetic path, with an emphasis on platforming Indigenous voices and offering an alternative to the loneliness, atomization, and fear created by the current technological and political climate, especially for Tucson Latinx communities. Featuring food and music while celebrating literacy, oral tradition, and our cultural heritage, ¡Somos Uno! centers poetry as an indispensable tool to collectively imagine the future we deserve.
About Logan Phillips
Logan Phillips is a writer, performer, and cultural worker. He is author of the poetry collections Reckon (University of Arizona Press, 2026) and Sonoran Strange (West End Press, 2015). He is also the creator of the ongoing multimedia and performance series NoVoGRAFíAS. Phillips is known for bilingual readings in English and Spanish and “spoken video” multimedia performance art pieces, which have been featured at festivals in Colombia, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has contributed to a wide range of publishing, music, education, and community-centered projects. Phillips lives in Tucson, where he works as an arts educator and cultural strategist. In 2026, he was appointed poet laureate of Tucson through 2029.
Kevin Prufer, Poet Laureate of Texas
Project Description
Kevin Prufer’s “Write Now: The Texas Poetries Anthology,” convenes ten recent Texas poets laureate to reflect on and curate their own poetic communities. The project asks a set of urgent and generative questions: What does it mean to inhabit a community of poets in Texas today? Which voices most need to be brought forward for contemporary readers? How might a poetic community be meaningfully represented on the page? And how do the state’s many poetry communities intersect, diverge, and sustain one another? Each participating laureate will be given twenty-two pages to address these questions. Two pages will present a brief, reflective essay on Texas, poetry, and community. The remaining twenty pages will feature poems that embody the laureate’s understanding of their community.
About Kevin Prufer
Kevin Prufer is the author of ten poetry collections, including Good People: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2027). He has also edited several volumes of poetry, including Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017), with Martha Collins . published a novel, titled Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2024).
Prufer has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. He is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and a cocurator of The Unsung Masters Series, a book series that brings the work by long-forgotten writers to new readers. The 2026 Texas poet laureate, Prufer lives in Houston.
Derek Sheffield, Poet Laureate of Washington
Project Description
Derek Sheffield will travel to all parts of Washington State and work with young people to help them write poems that engage with the natural world. Research and firsthand experience tell Sheffield that many of Washington’s young people are struggling with anxiety and depression which are often linked to too much screen time and too little sky time. Poetry and the natural world are both forces that can support mental wellness, and this is even truer when they are combined. Terrain.org, the oldest online journal on the planet dedicated to the art of place, will create a new series to publish the writing that comes from this work with youth. Words, Woods, and Wellness: Poetry by Washington State Youth will be like previous series at Terrain.org that have gained a wide readership, including Letters to America and A Life of Science . The final stage of this project, in cooperation with Mountaineers Books, is the publication of a book of poems that engages with the natural world in a way that sparks wonder and offers writers and readers a sense of peace and belonging.
About Derek Sheffield
Derek Sheffield is the author of several books, including Not for Luck (Michigan State University Press, 2021), selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He coedited, with CMarie Fuhrman and Elizabeth Bradfield , Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023), winner of a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2020), with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd. His other honors include the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee . He has received fellowships from Artist Trust, Spring Creek Project, Allied Arts, 4Culture, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Sheffield lives near Leavenworth, Washington, and is both a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College and poetry editor of Terrain.org. In 2025, he was appointed the eighth poet laureate of Washington State through 2027.
Jake Skeets, Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation
Project Description
In partnership with the Northern Arizona Book Festival, Jake Skeets will launch the Saad Prize, as part of his work with his public arts initiative Hootso. Designed to support and celebrate poetry by Diné communities, the Saad Prize recognizes literary excellence while exploring the role of language in contemporary Diné civic life. The 2027 prize cycle, “Chapter House: Nation / City / Beyond,” invites poets to reflect on the spaces where community, governance, kinship, and cultural life take shape across the Navajo Nation and beyond. Through a series of community workshops and public programming, the project will foster intergenerational dialogue, support emerging and established writers, and affirm poetry as a vital practice of Diné sovereignty, cultural continuity, and collective imagination.
About Jake Skeets
Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Waters Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico, and the author of Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2026) and Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019), selected by Kathy Fagan for the 2018 National Poetry Series. The book was also a recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Skeets’s other honors include a 92Y Discovery Prize, a Projecting All Voices Fellowship through Arizona State University and the Mellon Foundation, an American Book Award, and a 2020 Whiting Award. He was the 2023–24 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He served as Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day in November 2022. Skeets is currently serving as the third Navajo Nation poet laureate and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
Lee A. Tonouchi, Poet Laureate of Hawaiʻi
Project Description
Lee A. Tonouchi will create a poetry anthology featuring Hawaiʻi’s post-plantation-era, Asia-Pacific immigrant communities, which will include less represented communities who immigrated from the Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, and Southeast Asia.
About Lee A. Tonouchi
Lee A. Tonouchi (“Da Pidgin Guerrilla”) is an Okinawan Yonsei poet born in Honolulu and raised in Kaimukī and ‘Aiea, Hawai‘i. Tonouchi, known for writing in Hawai‘i Creole (Pidgin), is the author of Significant Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah and Son: One Hawai‘i Okinawan Journal (Bess Press, 2011), winner of the 2013 Poetry/Prose Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is also the author of the Pidgin short story collection Da Word (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2001), winner of the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. His children’s picture book, Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos (Bess Press, 2019), won the Skipping Stones Honor Award. He has also had several Pidgin plays produced by Kumu Kahua Theatre, Hawai‘i Conservatory of Performing Arts, and Honolulu Theatre for Youth. His play, Three Year Swim Club , was a Los Angeles Times Critic’s Choice Selection. In 2023, the American Association for Applied Linguistics recognized Tonouchi for his activism with a Distinguished Public Service Award for his work in raising public awareness of language-related issues and promoting linguistic social justice, particularly the importance of including Pidgin in academic and creative writing. In 2026, he was appointed the poet laureate of Hawai‘i through 2029.
Mark Turcotte, Poet Laureate of Illinois
Project Description
Mark Turcotte’s “Illinois Writes Together” is a three-phase project for which he will create and teach a statewide poetry writing assignment based on the “form” known as the “Where I’m From” poem. The form, as exemplified by American poet George Ella Lyon’s popular poem, “Where I’m From,” is intended to suggest not only where but the who, what, why and how of the poet’s origins, and will provide any and all Illinois residents with the opportunity to express, share and celebrate their own identities in a series of exhibitions and readings featuring the poems as broadsides and videos.
About Mark Turcotte
Mark Turcotte was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1958 and grew up in North Dakota on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and, later, in Lansing. An enrolled member of the Anishinaabe–Turtle Mountain Band, Turcotte is the author of four books of poetry including Exploding Chippewas (NU Press, 2002). Turcotte is the winner of the inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award, and the Wisconsin Arts Board named him a literary fellow in both 1999 and 2003. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Distinguished Writer in Residence at DePaul University. In 2025, Turcotte was appointed the sixth poet laureate of Illinois through 2029.
Press Photos
Click here for press photos of the 2026 Poet Laureate Fellows .
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, including its staff, Board of Directors, and Board of Chancellors, visit poets.org.
About the Mellon Foundation
The Mellon Foundation is the largest private funder of the arts, culture, and humanities in the United States. Since 1969, the Foundation has endeavored to build just communities by supporting and amplifying the diverse voices of creators, scholars, and culture-makers. Mellon makes grants in four core program areas: Higher Learning, Arts and Culture, Public Knowledge, and Humanities in Place. Through these grants, the Foundation seeks to enrich the cultural and intellectual heritage of the United States, championing the power of the arts and humanities in everyday life.
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