Unique Prize Connects Winners With Publishing Professionals
Scott Frey (left) and Jack Powers (right). Credit: Ben Barker, Hector Pachas.
New York, NY—July 30, 2026— Scott Frey, a poet from Granby, Connecticut and Jack Powers, a fiction writer from Fairfield, Connecticut, are the winners of the 2026 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award.
The Writers Exchange Award, sponsored by Poets & Writers, provides winners with a unique opportunity for professional advancement. The winners will be invited to compile “wish lists” of agents, editors, authors, and other literary professionals with whom they wish to meet. Poets & Writers will then arrange meetings with these individuals and others who might help Frey and Powers advance their careers. This fall, they will visit New York City, where Poets & Writers representatives will accompany them on a series of visits to gather advice, gain insights, and establish professional connections.
Poets and fiction writers from Connecticut were invited to apply for this year’s award. Poet Ciaran Berry judged for poetry and novelist Alejandro Heredia judged for fiction.
The Writers Exchange Award is generously supported by Maureen Mahon Egen, a member of the Poets & Writers Emeritus Board. As a direct result of receiving the award, past winners have gone on to publish books, obtain fellowships, secure teaching positions, and lay the groundwork for their professional writing careers. The award has helped to launch the careers of Sue Monk Kidd (The Invention of Wings, The Secret Life of Bees), David Mura (Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei), Craig Santos Perez (from unincorporated territory [åmot]), Mona Simpson (Casebook), Lidia Yuknavitch (Thrust), and others. To date, one hundred eighteen writers from forty-seven states and four jurisdictions have participated in this enriching, career-shaping experience.
Commenting on Frey’s winning poetry submission, Berry said, “At the center of these poems is the unfathomable loss of a young child. As we would expect, there’s a deep, unrelenting grief present throughout, a tragically earned sense of how precarious life is, and how suddenly and cruelly it can be snatched away. And yet, in these poems too, out of grief, comes a deeper sense of beauty and wonder, of gratitude for our brief time here and for the loves that make that time a gift. These are poems that would convince us that the elegy and the ode are intertwined.”
Heredia said of Powers’ winning fiction entry, “In these stories we follow time-traveling detectives and witness characters contemplate mortality on the surface of the moon, but no matter what iteration of the end of the world this author trains his sharp imagination on, nor how far he takes us from our own lived experiences, [Powers’] great stylistic and imaginative breadth always returns us to matters of the heart: what does it mean to love another person? How do we leave behind a legacy that will matter to another living being? This talented writer offers no easy solutions, only questions and characters which make us feel and think deeply. I can’t wait for the world to read these stories.”
The judges also cited first runners-up Benjamin Grossberg (fiction) and Aaron Caycedo-Kimura (poetry). Excerpts from the winning manuscripts can be found at pw.org/WEX.
Scott Frey is a poet, educator, and author of Heavy Metal Nursing (University of Tampa Press, 2024), which was awarded the 2023 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His chapbook, Strange Vigil, received Honorable Mention at the 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition, and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2025. Among other places, his work appears in Passages North, New York Quarterly, the Adroit Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, and the Missouri Review, where he was awarded the Perkoff Prize for poetry. He and his wife run the Charlotte Frey Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses and their families improve their quality of life. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.
Jack Powers is the author of two poetry collections: Everybody’s Vaguely Familiar (Golden Antelope Press, 2018) and Still Love (Golden Antelope Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Rattle, and Salamander. His fiction has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Fiction on the Web. He lives in Fairfield, Connecticut.
ABOUT POETS & WRITERS
Poets & Writers is the primary source of trustworthy information, professional guidance, support, and inspiration for writers throughout the United States. 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, online resources that help writers navigate the marketplace and connect to the literary community, and programs that provide professional development and financial support 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 anti-racist organization. Learn more at pw.org.
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