News

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that they have selected Cortney Lamar Charleston's A Republic, If for this year's title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), selected by D. A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), named a best book of 2021 by the New York Public Library and the Boston Globe; and It's Important I Remember (Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press, 2026). He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, the Nation, the Atlantic, the American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, and many other periodicals and anthologies. Charleston currently serves on the Haymarket Books Poetry Advisory Board.

When you subscribe to the BPJ, you’ll receive as part of your subscription a copy of the forthcoming chapbook in the series. Not a subscriber? Subscribe here.

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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.

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We're excited to welcome Sara Elkamel to our feature, BPJ Poets In Conversation. She spoke with us about Garden City, Winner of the 2025 Chad Walsh Chapbook Series.

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The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are pleased to accept entries for the 2026 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. The award was established in 2017, with the support of the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. 
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All submissions will be considered for publication, and the winner will receive $1,500. Submissions will remain open through April 30. For more details, see our guidelines.

Sara Elkamel's chapbook, "Garden City," is now available! Visit our shop today to get your hands on a copy of this winner of the 2025 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize. Ken Chen writes of this collection, “Garden City is a lapidary, fecund investigation of the lives of women: mothers and kittens, sisters and angels—as well as female prisoners of the state, who coexist in a temporally synesthetic lockdown between pharaonic and contemporary Egypt." Order a copy today.

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that final judge Nikky Finney has chosen Sydney Mayes’s "Golden Glosa with My Hand Atop My Mother’s” as the winner of the 2025 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry.

Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. She is the inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, The Hopkins Review, and Poets.org among other publications. A two-time Pushcart nominee, Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers' Conference, Community of Writers, Lighthouse Writers and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

Of Mayes’s poem Nikky Finney writes, “This incredible poem sees into its focal moment with the greatest of clarity, attention to detail, and astonishing matrilineal love. The architect of these words is rich in their understanding of the precious moment they have dipped the reader into. Their deep desire to build a worthy and creative vessel for our travel is levitational. A Golden Glosa takes us there. The memory of the beautician-mother teaching the poet-daughter is the engine, Tretheway’s epigraph is the oil running through the metal/mettle of memory, but the poet composes the journey with an incredible veracity of memorable verbs and a keen understanding of the power of an opening line that whispers all the way through and ultimately suspends us in the air, most especially just before they hurl us into the magnolia “Blue Magic” aroma of this simile:

She taught me the art of/ the silk press, the stiletto nail, to blow on wig glue,/ like my mouth was trying to drive/ the buffalo from the great plains.

It is a woman’s poem, a daughter’s poem, a poem of seeking and permission that Ibelieve Adrienne Rich would hold in her glorious poetic hands and wave in the air while continuing to insist that all is not lost between us."

Along with naming the winner, Finney selected three finalists, Danielle Shandiin Emerson for "Epic-yazhí of a retired Red Valley Cowboy" and Angela Narciso Torres for "Grief Triptych Beginning with a Line from Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary.”
The editors also selected as semi-finalists Cortney Lamar Charleston’s "Igbo Landing" and "Revival,” Kate O'Donoghue’s "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Clara-Læila Laudette’s "Emetic for the modern coward," Betsy Mitchell Martinez’s "Honors History,” Valencia Robin’s “"Lt. Uhura, Communications Officer, Star Trek" and Lisbeth White’s "Feed Store".
The winning poem will appear in an upcoming issue of the BPJ.

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

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