“In a world that is increasingly unstable, the brave compassion of these poems,
both profound and hard won, is a rare and precious thing.”
Cyrus Cassells (Credit: Eyoel Kahssay)
New York, NY—April 28, 2025—Poets & Writers today announced that Cyrus Cassells has won the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize, which carries a monetary award of $100,000. Bestowed annually by Poets & Writers to recognize an American poet of exceptional talent, the prize is endowed by a gift from the Liana Foundation and named for the John and Susan Jackson family.
Cassells, the nineteenth winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize, is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982–2022, published earlier this year by TCU Press. He was selected as this year’s winner of the Jackson Prize by a panel of three judges: the esteemed poets James Richardson, Patricia Spears Jones, and Chase Twichell. The judges issued the following citation:
Cyrus Cassells is the most cosmopolitan of poets. His concerns and concepts range over both history and place—from the courage of Black students integrating Little Rock’s Central High to memories of Holocaust survivors and discovering the power of duende in the Catalan poets. Cassells is an African American poet at home in a larger world, observing political violence and sensuous experience with deep humanity. In a Cassells poem, brutality can be conjured with formal elegance, and an erotic encounter can leave a scar of sadness. Painterly, precise, simultaneously strange and utterly familiar, his imagery is indelible. His language is inventive and delicate, jolting the reader by pairing words that seem never before to have been used in the same line: “coal-dark and stillborn grapes,” “the choir of cliffs,” “a hurrah/ of wheeling blackbirds,” “premonitory wheat.” In a world that is increasingly unstable, the brave compassion of these poems, both profound and hard won, is a rare and precious thing. They’re intimate with pain, yes, with betrayal, racism, and cruelty, and they also show us how to recognize and protect the glimmers of hope that survive.
The Jackson Poetry Prize has been awarded each year since 2007. Thanks to an endowment from the Liana Foundation, the value of the prize has grown to $100,000, making it among the most generous awards offered to an American poet. Recipients of the Jackson Prize have gone on to receive numerous additional honors. The first recipient, named in 2007, was Elizabeth Alexander, who was later selected to read at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Others have included Claudia Rankine (2014), who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016; Patricia Spears Jones (2017), who was appointed New York State Poet in 2023 and named a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets; Joy Harjo (2019), who was named United States Poet Laureate that same year and received the 2022 National Humanities Medal; Carl Phillips (2021), who received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Sonia Sanchez (2022), who received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Edward MacDowell Medal that same year. There is no application process for the Jackson Poetry Prize; poets are nominated by a panel of their peers, who are selected by Poets & Writers and remain anonymous. Those who have served as judges are among America’s most distinguished poets. Find a full list of prior winners and judges here.
ABOUT CYRUS CASSELLS
Cyrus Cassells, the 2021–2022 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982–2022 (TCU Press, 2025); Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way Books, 2024), named a Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library; The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books, 2022), a Housatonic Book Award finalist; and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power, a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada and featuring art by Octavio Quintanilla, forthcoming in 2026 from 3: A Taos Press.
Cassells is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019), and To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023). Both volumes garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. Cassells’s translation of The Man with the Oar on His Shoulder: Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (forthcoming in 2026 from Stephen F. Austin State University Press) recently received, in manuscript, Honorable Mention for the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation.
Cassells’s honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, the National Poetry Series, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.
ABOUT POETS & WRITERS
Founded in 1970, Poets & Writers has been the primary source of trustworthy information, professional guidance, support, and inspiration for writers for fifty-five years. Our work is rooted in the belief that literature is vital to sustaining a vibrant culture, and we focus on nurturing literature’s source: creative writers. Our mission is to foster the professional development of poets and writers, to promote communication throughout the literary community, and to help create an environment in which literature can be appreciated by the widest possible public.
We advance this mission through our flagship publication, Poets & Writers Magazine; pw.org, a website that offers information, inspiration, and a lively online community for writers; and programs that provide professional development opportunities, financial support, and validation for writers. We sponsor the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award and the Jackson Poetry Prize. Our work is guided by our core values: service, inclusivity, integrity, and excellence, and by our commitment to becoming an antiracist organization. Learn more at pw.org.
###
Contact:
Rachel Schuder
Director of Development & Communications
rschuder@pw.org