Autumn House Press Poetry Prize

"Feminist and humanist, the vision here is both passionate and compassionate. It's a pageturner to be sure." -Kazim Ali Betsy Fagin's self-driving reimagines the American road trip through the lens of a contemporary woman's journey. Rooted in the tradition of the on-the-road narrative, Fagin's poems interrogate the foundations of freedom, representation, and privilege while dismantling romanticized myths of Western expansion and the cis, white, male-dominated tales of the open road. Through sharp, playful, and incisive verse, Fagin celebrates Black, queer, feminist presence and futures, confronting the erasures and delusions in America's frequently told stories. Using images of the great American West and the highways that connect it, she charts a path through landscapes of disenfranchisement toward self-determination and agency. Throughout the collection, self-driving redefines freedom as both a state and a mindset. In a bold declaration, Fagin writes: "I knew my rights / were all the rights, my freedoms all the freedoms," embodying a call for expansive liberation. This collection is a powerful exploration of identity, impermanence, and the boundless possibilities of reimagined narratives.

The debut poetry collection of Charles Kell, Cage of Lit Glass engages themes of death, incarceration, and family through a range of physical, emotional, and philosophical spaces. In startling images of beauty and violence, Kell creates a haunting world that mirrors our individual and cultural fears. Cage of Lit Glass follows multiple individuals and points of view, all haunted by various states of unease and struggle that follow them like specters as they navigate their world. Kell's poems form blurred narratives and playful experiments from our attempts to build lives from despair. A tense and insightful collection, these works will follow the reader long after the book is finished. https://youtu.be/X5AEqKId9Tg. Watch Jon Riccio interview Charles Kell about his "Oblivion Letter."

This stunning debut collection explores family culture, motherhood, and memory.

Shayla Lawz's debut collection, speculation, n., brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean-in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media-to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real-a refracted past and present-through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities. https://youtu.be/-jqO04mJz3c. Thanks to House Party ( a digital performance and publication series out of The Poetry Project) for featuring Shay.

In Berger's third collection, she combines the philosophical with the everyday in order to examine a broken world.

Jane Satterfield's fourth poetry collection, Apocalypse Mix, dives into a musical, war-torn, elegiac past.

Akers' collection of lyric poems celebrates our everyday world while not glossing over the pain suffered by those who inhabit it. These beautifully crafted, quiet poems are simultaneously powerful to read.

A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon's debut presents a poetry collection of gender questioning, concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable. In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety-wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves.

This collection is musical, haunting, and simmering with life. Cundieff's poems deal with loss and change through images that are startling in their originality. These poems will stay with you; they will remind you what poems can do.

Darius Atefat-Peckham's debut poetry collection follows a boy's coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead. Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother's poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one's beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory "like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue."

Crockett considers the intimacies of daily life and what it means to be interconnected.

This collection weaves together themes of motherhood, immigration, social transformation, and interrogation. Throughout Seed Celestial, Sara R. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins-of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers-as she looks to an uncertain future. Bringing together contemporary issues of climate change, gun violence, and feminism while working from her own experience of raising a young daughter, she writes, "You were inside my body / while I was outside; / outside was everything else." Burnett vividly renders her own origin story as an immigrant's daughter using the myths of Demeter and Persephone. This book is a love letter to the earth the way only a mother can write it: appreciating all its faults while seeing its beauty. Burnett offers a poetry collection that is tender, and honest, akin to having an intimate conversation with a friend who tells us what we know to be true about ourselves, our twin capacities for love and violence, and what we don't. She intertwines our violent, complicated world with the uncanny human capacity for hope and describes the awe of a world recreating itself again and again while wondering about all we lose and leave behind, especially for the next generation.

St. Francis and the Flies is the 11th poetry collection of noted translator, Brian Swann. These stunning poems engage with the natural world unlike any other poet of our time. Rich with history, Swann's poem are both complex and delicate.

The poems in under the aegis of a winged mind are inspired by the life and times of the jazz composer and pianist Earl "Bud" Powell. Powell was a leading figure in the development of jazz, but throughout his life, he also faced struggles with police brutality, harassment, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental illness. In this collection, makalani bandele explores Powell's life through a blend of both formal and free verse persona poems. These poems are multivocal, with the speaker often embodying Powell himself and sometimes a close friend or family member, the spectator of a performance, or a fellow musician. While the book follows the narrative of Powell's life, the poems are experimental in form and presentation. As the book recounts Powell's life, it also explores how Black genius has encountered, struggled against, and developed mechanisms to cope with White supremacy in the United States. https://youtu.be/XlYSXd9SBUA. Video Production by Nicolas Volosky

From the new introduction by the author: "I expected to meet a stranger, someone naive and very different than what I remember, but Lucky Wreck is not a stranger at all. Lucky Wreck is me at the beginning, at a doorway. It is, quite simply, where 'I' began." The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón's award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.

Chelsea Rathburn's second collection continues to amaze with her ability to direct a clear poet's gaze on every aspect of life. Working in both free-verse and form, this book solidifies Rathburn as an essential voice for contemporary poetry.