Daily News Item 2026-05-06 15:13

Poets & Writers today announced that Marianne Boruch is the winner of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize, a $100,000 award given to “an American poet of exceptional talent.” 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. The judges were Major Jackson, Cole Swensen, and Afaa Michael Weaver. “In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought,” the judges wrote in their citation. 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).