Brenda Shaughnessy, this year’s judge, has chosen Courage and the Clock by Emma Trelles of Santa Barbara, California, as the 2026 Akron Poetry Prize winner. The contest received a total of 656 entries. .
Regarding the winning manuscript, Shaughnessy states:
Courage and the Clock is a revelation. These poems elegantly deliver so much juicy, live, beloved consciousness, from a radiant mind in contact with the fervor and flavor of desire, that quest for fuller life, that fighting spirit. They read like Sapphics, near-palpable fragments from a soul-barer, all that passion and curiosity driving evermore towards a divine awakening. These pages are illuminated.
Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is the 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA, and the recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. A graduate CantoMundo Fellow, her work has been longlisted in the Best Literary Translations 2027 anthology and has appeared in Poetry International, New England Review, Poetry, and the Academy’s Poem-A-Day series. She is a contributing editor at SWWIM and the series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize, open to Latine poets in the US and published in bilingual editions by Gunpowder Press. For more, visit emmatrelles.com.
The judge for the 2027 Akron Poetry Prize competition will be announced soon. The guidelines for the annual Akron Poetry Prize competition may be found here.
2026 Akron Poetry Prize Finalists
Colossus by O-Jeremiah Agbaakin
The Song Inside Your Body by Amanda Auchter
As Night Falls Around Us by Rose Auslander
Loop Hole by Julie Choffel
Singing Ground by Samantha DeFlitch
The Owl-Light by Deborah Fass
Black Witch Moth by Henrietta Goodman
Found | Poems by Anne Halsey
Psalms Against Forgetting by Zachary Kluckman
Emergency Contact by Jacqueline Lyons
Temperance Union by Teresa K Miller
Architecture of Grief by Sarah Nance
Hush Weather by John Nieves
Kaze no Denwa / The Wind Phone by Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh
Corset by Corinna Schroeder
Plaint by Sarah Sousa