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Find The New Yorker’s announcement here.
The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry with The New Yorker. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 7 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 19, 2025.
Nine of the ten poets on the 2025 Poetry Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees. The only poet that has been previously honored by the National Book Awards is Patricia Smith, who was a 2008 Finalist for her poetry collection Blood Dazzler. Five of this year’s Longlisted titles come from independent publishers and one comes from a university press, including one publisher appearing on the National Book Award Longlists for the first time: Alice James Books.
The poets on this year’s Longlist have been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kenyon Review Fellowship, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship, Rhizome DC, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and VisArts. They have been recognized by the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, Griffin Poetry Prize, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Lambda Literary Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Whiting Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and more.
Two Longlisted collections confront the very idea, and possibility, of freedom. The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems covers decades of Patricia Smith’s career, featuring new and previously uncollected poems deeply rooted in Black joy—in defiance of the centuries of violence committed against Black people in the United States. The Intentions of Thunder moves deftly through the painful landscapes of the past, the fullness of the present moment, and towards a rapturous future. Through a variety of experimental forms, including an invented visual form—the Gazan Tunnel—queer Palestinian performance artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi traverses the interconnected territories of despair, outrage, and love. The debut collection TERROR COUNTER explores a history of survival against terror, urging us to imagine Palestinian futures free from endless violence, self-preservation, and the colonial gaze—instead embracing an ongoing pursuit of individual and collective liberation.
Survival—as an artist and as a human—is interrogated by three 2025 Poetry Longlisters. Through an investigation of method acting, the commodification of the self, and abstract expressionism, Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead questions what it means to survive and thrive as a working artist living under late-stage capitalism, and wonders “whether being born is worth it.” Shapero examines power, survival, and the fine line between private and public with humor and self-deprecation. Richard Siken writes his way through the aftermath of a stroke—recovering language, memories, and his sense of self in the process. Through 77 autobiographical prose poems, I Do Know Some Things accepts the limitations of memory and the potential liberation of unreliable narration in rewriting one’s own story. The New Economy, told through the point of view of an ungendered body as it ages, interrogates childhood memories, considers what it takes to endure great loss, and reflects on the desire to accept and protect one’s own body as it is, while simultaneously yearning to have been born in another. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s collection centers the act of daily survival and embodies a dedication to finding pleasure in both the everyday and the extraordinary.
Two Longlisted titles reclaim the expansiveness of queer and trans identity, in each poet’s own words. Rickey Laurentiis ruminates on what it means to be a Black trans woman living in the US with her lyrical collection Death of the First Idea. Drawing on poetic traditions ranging from Greek odes to early Black Spirituals, Laurentiis chronicles a period of ten years, while she transitions and transforms—welcoming and celebrating the necessity of reshaping and reclaiming one’s own mind, body, and identity. Tiana Clark’s collection Scorched Earth is an ode to how to survive after an ending—in Clark’s case, divorce. Clark examines institutional and historical suffering, while simultaneously exploring sensuality and embracing radical self-love as a queer Black woman.
At once imaginative and historical, three 2025 Longlists consider the multigenerational impact of war, migration, and colonialism. Gbenga Adesina examines exile, faith, and cross-continental voyages in his debut collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea. Drawing from the experiences of historical figures like James Baldwin and Fela Kuti, alongside the author’s own family members, Adesina’s elegy of personal and collective loss offers a vulnerable exploration of global Black identity and migration. Esther Lin’s debut collection tells the story of an undocumented narrator, the daughter of parents who fled Communist China first for Brazil and later to the United States, and ultimately found community in religion. Cold Thief Place draws from Lin’s experiences, alongside the real and imagined experiences of her ancestors, using the confessional form to deepen generational understanding. Cathy Linh Che recounts her estranged parents’ journey to the United States after escaping the Vietnam War as refugees, and later cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—a 1979 film about the Vietnam War—inherently silencing them and casting them “into the margins / of [their] own story.” A reclamation that moves Vietnamese voices to the center of their own narrative, Becoming Ghost is a testament to the complexities of forgiveness and a reminder that healing often requires us to revisit our history in order to move forward.
Publishers submitted a total of 285 books for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. The judges for Poetry are Kate Daniels, Terrance Hayes (Chair), H. Melt, Anis Mojgani, and Caridad Moro-Gronlier. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. For more information about the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
Gbenga Adesina, Death Does Not End at the Sea
University of Nebraska Press
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, The New Economy
Copper Canyon Press
Cathy Linh Che, Becoming Ghost
Washington Square Press / Simon & Schuster
Tiana Clark, Scorched Earth
Washington Square Press / Simon & Schuster
Rickey Laurentiis, Death of the First Idea
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Esther Lin, Cold Thief Place
Alice James Books
Natalie Shapero, Stay Dead
Copper Canyon Press
Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things
Copper Canyon Press
Patricia Smith, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, TERROR COUNTER
Deep Vellum / Deep Vellum Publishing
