“In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought."
Marianne Boruch (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
New York, NY—May 6, 2026—Marianne Boruch has won the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize, which recognizes an American poet of exceptional talent and carries a generous monetary award of $100,000. Established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize is bestowed annually by Poets & Writers and named for the John and Susan Jackson family. Boruch is the twentieth winner.
“In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought,” begins the citation written by the panel of judges who selected this year’s winner. They are the esteemed poets Major Jackson, Cole Swensen, and Afaa Michael Weaver. (Major Jackson is not related to Susan and John Jackson.)
Boruch is an emeritus professor of creative writing at Purdue University, where she founded the MFA program and taught for more than thirty years. She has written eleven books of poetry, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as essays, memoir, and hybrid work. Her previous honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and numerous fellowships. Upon learning that she is this year’s Jackson Poetry Prize winner, Boruch reacted with disarming modesty, asking: “Are you kidding?”
The judges were impressed by Boruch’s scope, as well as her craft. They noted her curiosity and the range of subjects her poems address: “With the compassion and reverence that comes with the pursuit of emptiness, Boruch also examines two of the most important and confounding issues of our time, the health of the natural world and the spiritual contexts of our uninhabited bodies. … It is Boruch’s keen intelligence and genuine concern that takes her to this work and brings back to us these gems that do not shrink from frankness, as she looks everywhere for what can help us see. To read Boruch is to constantly look up with eyes a little more widely open and think, yes!”
Read the full citation here.
Endowed by a gift from the Liana Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize is one of the most generous awards offered to an American poet. Recipients of the prize have gone on to receive numerous additional honors. Elizabeth Alexander, the first recipient of the prize, named in 2007, was selected to read at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. Arthur Sze, the 2013 winner, is currently serving as U.S. Poet Laureate. Other recipients include 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 U.S. 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. Jackson Prize judges are among America’s most distinguished poets. Find a full list of prior winners and judges here.
ABOUT MARIANNE BORUCH
Marianne Boruch is author of eleven poetry collections, including Bestiary Dark (2021); The Anti-Grief (2019); Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016); Cadaver, Speak (2014); and The Book of Hours (2011), all published by Copper Canyon Press. Her earlier collections include Grace, Fallen (Wesleyan University Press, 2010) and Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004).
Boruch has also written essays, including Sing by the Burying Ground (Northwestern, 2024), and memoir/hybrid memoir, including The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011) and The Figure Going Imaginary (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). A recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bellagio Center, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Fulbright Scholar Program (Scotland, Australia, and, in 2027, Norway); and residencies from Colby College, the Anderson Center, the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest, and at national parks, including Isle Royale and Denali.
She founded Purdue University’s MFA program in creative writing in 1987 and has been an emeritus member of the faculty since 2018 after having taught there for over three decades. She has been on faculty in the low-residency Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers since 1988. Her work appears in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, APR, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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[Correction]An earlier version of this press release misstated that Patricia Spears Jones received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. While she is the recipient of numerous honors, she has not been awarded this prize. We regret the error.
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