Poetry News & Events

Poetry alum Jaia Hamid Bashir '20 published her debut collection of poetry, The Afterlife of Sweetness, this past February after the book received the Charles B. Wheeler Prize in 2024.

Carlie Hoffman '19 has been awarded the Mid Atlantic Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Joining faculty, students, and friends in the audience of the Lenfest Center for the Arts the evening of February 12, were several ghosts. Read more about this recent event featuring poet Forrest Gander.

Writing alum Dolapo Demuren '17 was selected as a winner of the 2025 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, a national award from America's oldest poetry organization which includes publication of his manuscript, American Love Sonnets.

Poetry alum Isabella DeSendi '17 has published her debut full-length poetry collection, Someone Else’s Hunger, with Four Way Books.

Triage, the newest book from Writing alum Claudia Rankine '93, will be making its way to bookshelves on August 4, 2026. 

Pulitzer prize winner, former poet laureate, Poetry alum, and current professor at Harvard, Tracy K. Smith '97 has published a new book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, with Norton Press.

Poetry Concentration Head and Associate Professor Dorothea Lasky will publish her latest book, Memory, with Semiotext(e) on November 4, 2025.

Writing alum Eduardo Martinez-Leyva '15 has been awarded the 2025 Lammy Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry for his book Cowboy Park (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024). 

Writing alum Adam O. Davis '06 has won the 2025 Raz/Schumaker Poetry Prize from Prairie Schooner for his second book of poems, Pyrrhic Symphony. 

Nonfiction alum Raffi Joe Wartanian ’21 was named an Academy of American Poets 2025 Poet Laureate Fellow.

Poetry student Diana Athena explores healing after loss in her debut poetry collection Echoes in Still Air.