News

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that final judge Dorianne Laux has chosen C. A. Patrick Parker’s "Power and Control” as the winner of the 2026 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry.

C. A. Patrick Parker is a poet and songwriter from the Texas Gulf Coast. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow and a volunteer with the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, and The Florida Review, which awarded him their 2023 Editor's Prize in Poetry. A lay minister at an Episcopal church and the poetry editor for The Mockingbird Magazine, he lives in Austin, Texas.

Noting the force of Parker's poem, Dorianne Laux writes,  "Power and Control.  Two gods bowling, knocking down the dumb-struck mortals at the end of the road. An apt metaphor for how they make a game of it all, aiming for complete and utter and mindless annihilation."

Along with naming the winner, Laux selected two finalists, Aspen Taylor for "The Bride" and Yara Zgheib for "In Martyr's Square".
The editors also selected as semi-finalists Kenzie Allen's "All This Blessed Matriarchy", Jade Cho's "Angel Island: Oral History", Leila Farjami's "The Girl Before the War", Jordan St. Hill's "While in Rome I Videocall My Orthopedic Surgeon Who Asks, What's your pain 1-10?", Maya Marshall's "A Revised Tale of the Africans who Flew", Shaina Phenix's "Harlem's Sestina", Diane Seuss's "Madame Curie", Laura Villareal's "A Meal Makes a Female" and Felicia Zamora's "F_el_Note: Hauntology".
The winning poem will appear in an upcoming issue of the BPJ.

We’re grateful to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and to all who submitted poems for this year’s contest.

‍