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Find the New Yorker announcement here.
The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry with The New Yorker. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 6 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 18, 2026. For more information and to register to watch the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
Four of the ten poets are past honorees for the National Book Award for Poetry: Victoria Chang was Longlisted in 2020 for Obit, Brenda Hillman was Longlisted in 2013 for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, Fady Joudah was a Finalist in 2024 for […], and Layli Long Soldier was a Finalist in 2017 for WHEREAS. Four of this year’s Longlisted titles come from independent publishers, and three come from university presses.
The poets on this year’s Longlist have been supported by the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation, and more. They have been recognized by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the California Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Whiting Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and others. Among the poets are a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a current Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation.
Two of this year’s Longlisters explore the power of language as a tool for understanding ourselves, our ancestry, and our shared futures. Layli Long Soldier wields different forms of storytelling and knowledge sharing in her latest collection, We—“we” in English, the first-person plural pronoun, and “wé” in Lakota, the “blood” that connects the Lakota people to one another and to the land. Blending poetry, essay, and original artwork, Long Soldier examines what it means to be in collaboration and community with Indigenous culture across time and space. Carolina Ebeid excavates memories—of her Palestinian father and Cuban mother’s forced migrations—in order to reconstruct her own ancestry and chart her path forward. Interlacing American English, Palestinian Arabic, and Cuban Spanish, Hide deconstructs the confines of place and language, collapsing distances and liberating meaning.
Three Poetry collections examine space and displacement, asking how we find home and belonging in an ever-changing world. Haunted by a eucalyptus tree cut down on her street, Victoria Chang contemplates art, nature, death, and the afterlife in her latest collection of poetry interspersed with embroidered photography. Tree of Knowledge’s central poem examines the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California, asking who has the right to remain and flourish—in this country and on this earth. Jake Skeets’s latest collection is inspired by the discovery of 200 dead horses on Navajo land, tracing the shifting geographical and cultural landscapes of the Navajo Nation alongside the evolution of language. Through the lens of a queer, Indigenous poet, Horses considers how the body and the land are inseparable and relational forces amidst the growing threat of climate catastrophe. Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation is the last collection in Brenda Hillman’s quartet about time—the days, seasons, and years that make up our lives—surveyed through an ecological journey into her childhood home. Exploring dream-like rooms, domestic objects, and human interactions with non-human creatures, this collection meditates on the people, things, and spaces that raise us.
Two Longlisted works explore the tension of witness and survival, of healing and destruction, and of writing yourself and your people into existence. Palestinian American physician Fady Joudah contemplates his split role as a witness to the ongoing destruction of Gaza and as a physician living in a country complicit in that very destruction. Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza refuses the ongoing erasure of Palestine, presenting poems, images, and translations of unknowable grief and steadfast resilience to create an affirmation of Palestinian life. Jonah Mixon-Webster takes readers on a three-party journey of a haunted and haunting rebirth, informed by the poet’s upbringing in Flint, Michigan. Promise/Threat delves into the dreams and nightmares of the poet’s youth, his inner psyche as a Black man in modern America, and his candid realization that the “real poem is the life I’m writing.”
This year’s Longlist features three works that borrow from mythology, religion, and history to reflect the poets’ personal journeys and reimagine the cultural contexts of present-day existence. Richie Hofmann’s queer coming-of-age collection The Bronze Arms explores Greek myths, sex and love, and the vulnerability of the human body. At the core of this collection lies the memory of nearly drowning in a pool as a child, which serves an anchor for Hofmann to examine risk and rescue, abandonment and intimacy, and the universal desire to survive. Jake Rose’s debut poetry collection reimagines Joan of Arc’s life and transforms her body, mind, and legacy into a historical framework that explores queer identity and desire. Merging biography and autobiography, JOAN grapples with what it means to embrace—and transform—oneself through art, language, and gender expression. The eponymous bramble in Susan Stewart’s collection evokes ballads, fairy tales, and the biblical book of Judges in a three-part meditation on contradiction, entanglement, and struggle. Suffused with song, poetry, and elegy, Bramble explores personal suffering and change and then applies that philosophy to the world around us.
Publishers submitted a total of 285 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry. The judges for Poetry are Rob Arnold, Aracelis Girmay (Chair), Jon Pineda, Roger Reeves, and Rosanna Warren. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.
Victoria Chang, Tree of Knowledge
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Carolina Ebeid, Hide
Graywolf Press
Brenda Hillman, Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation
Wesleyan University Press
Richie Hofmann, The Bronze Arms
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Fady Joudah, Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza
Milkweed Editions
Layli Long Soldier, We
Graywolf Press
Jonah Mixon-Webster, Promise/Threat
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Jake Rose, JOAN
University of Chicago Press
Jake Skeets, Horses
Milkweed Editions
Susan Stewart, Bramble
University of Chicago Press
