2026 Summer Fellows

Congratulations to the twelve early-career poets who will be part of the Poetry Society’s inaugural Summer Fellowship: S. Erin Batiste, Adriana Beltrano, Mitchell Bradford III, Cynthia Clifford, Isabella DeSendi, Cicely Grace, Eve Kenneally, Miguel Martin Perez, Kimberly Ramos, Timothy Ree, Lina Stoyanovich, and Dujie Tahat.

The Summer Fellowship is a weeklong, writing-intensive program offered to poets free of charge at the Poetry Society’s offices in New York City. Structured around a daily workshop led by distinguished poet Lynn Melnick, it is supplemented by field trips and class visits from writers, editors, and literary professionals.

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet. She is a 2026 Corsicana Writer in Residence and a 2025–2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature. Additionally, she has received fellowships and generous support from Cave Canem, New York Foundation for the Arts, Brown University, PEN America, The Poetry Project, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference & Rona Jaffe Foundation, among other honors. Her poetry is published in wildness, Interim, and New Letters, and she is currently working on her debut poetry collection, Hoard.

Adriana Beltrano is a Floridian poet pursuing her MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a managing editor of The Hopkins Review. She was a 2024–25 Jake Adam York Prize finalist and was selected by Diane Seuss as an honorable mention for the 2025 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Hayden's Ferry Review, Passages North, and Puerto del Sol.

Mitchell Bradford III is a poet from the Mississippi Delta currently living in New York City. Alongside his day job at the New York Public Library, he is also completing his degree in Creative Writing at Columbia University. In the past, he has participated in workshops and fellowships hosted by the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Cave Canem, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and the Community of Writers, among others.

Cynthia Clifford is a Mexican-American poet from Southern California's Inland Empire. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she received the Linda Corrente Fellowship and teaches as an assistant adjunct professor of creative writing. Based in Brooklyn, her poetry appears in Witness Magazine, Quibble Lit, and other journals.

Isabella DeSendi’s debut poetry collection, Someone Else's Hunger (Four Way Books, 2025), received the gold medal from the 2025 North American Book Awards. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she was named a 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, among other awards.

Cicely Grace was a finalist for the 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award, the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2024 Foster Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prism International, Yolk Literary, Pinky Magazine, CV2, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Master's degree in English Literature at the University of British Columbia while working on her debut poetry collection.

Eve Kenneally is a Brooklyn-based poet and social worker. They have an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana, and their poems have been published in The Journal, THRUSH, Salt Hill, and other places.

Miguel Martin Perez (he/they) is a queer Afro-Dominican poet from Harlem and the South Bronx, a Cave Canem Fellow, and an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshop, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and the Southampton Writers Conference. His work has been awarded the 2023 Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize and the 2021 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, Colorado Review, and About Place Journal, among other places. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside, and currently resides in the Bronx.

Kimberly Ramos is a Filipina writer from Southern Missouri based in Providence, Rhode Island, where they are a candidate of philosophy at Brown University. They are the author of two chapbooks: Alive, Today, Again! (Flume Press, 2023) and The Beginner's Guide to Minor Gods and Other Small Spirits (Unsolicited Press, 2023). They were recently named the winner of the 2025 Frontier Poetry Myths & Fables Prize, and their work was selected as the ONLYPOEMS Poem of the Month for October 2024. They have been published in Northwest Review, Black Warrior Review, and Quarterly West, among other places.

Timothy Ree is the son of Korean immigrants. He teaches literature and writing at a public high school in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BA in English Literature from Wheaton College and an M.Div from Yale University. His poems have appeared in Tribes, Great Weather for Media, and The Cortland Review. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cave Canem, Poets House, Academy for Teachers, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a recipient of the Robert Haiduke Poetry Prize from the Bread Loaf School of English.

Lina Stoyanovich is a New York–based writer. Her work is forthcoming in Willow Springs Magazine.

Dujie Tahat is the author of Shibboleth (Fonograf, 2027) as well as three poetry chapbooks: Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship; Salat, winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award and longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection; and Balikbayan, finalist for The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM chapbook contest and the Center for Book Arts honoree. Dujie has earned fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, National Book Critics Circle, and the Poetry Foundation. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon podcast.

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation and Amazon Literary Partnerships.