Award Winners
Norma Farber First Book Award - 2026
Esther Lin
Finalists
Isabella DeSendi
Bobby Elliott
Brian Gyamfi
Kieron Walquist
Reading Madame Bovary
That afternoon Bovary went
to the apothecary’s closet,
fumbling for arsenic
to draw out her black bile,
make her mouth a hole.
She waited hours for the worst of it,
the shearing of her dark lovely hair—
though for many years
my mother’s hair was not lovely
but thin as sagebrush
an autumn fire had passed over.
There are mothers who demand
a price. Youth. Sex organs
without cancer. She said,
You can’t know how bad it is.
Bovary’s daughter worked in a satin mill.
There is no talk of her beauty.
To say my mother was not beautiful
when she died is merciless.
Today I am without mercy.
Reprinted from Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, 2025) with permission.
Maya C. Popa on Esther Lin
In a year of spectacular debuts, I could not stop thinking about—and returning to—Lin's Cold Thief Place. It is masterful in its precision, unflinching honesty, and scope, recounting a personal story, yes, but equally bringing structural barriers to light with unforgettable clarity and economy. Lin makes it impossible to overlook (or purposely look away) from what it means to be undocumented and to navigate one’s own multicultural inheritance in the United States. I am grateful to this exceptional writer for crafting this exemplary collection—a debut, yes, but remarkable by any measure.
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Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, which is longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award; The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship; and she is the co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). She was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
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Finalists
Isabella DeSendi, Someone Else's Hunger (Four Way Books)
Read a poem from the collection
Bobby Elliott, The Same Man (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press)
Read a poem from the collection
Brian Gyamfi, What God in the Kingdom of Bastards (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press)
Read a poem from the collection
Kieron Walquist, Our Hands Hold Violence (Beacon Press)
Read a poem from the collection
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About the Finalists
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator, and the author of Someone Else’s Hunger, which 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. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She has been named a 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Bobby Elliott is an award-winning poet and teacher. His debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Raised in New York City, he earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, BOMB, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons.
Brian Gyamfi is the author of What God in the Kingdom of Bastards. He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Zell Fellowship, and two Hopwood Awards. A finalist for the Oxford Poetry Prize and the Poetry International Prize, his writing has appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Guernica, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry.
Kieron Walquist is the author of Our Hands Hold Violence, a 2024 National Poetry Series winner. Their other work appears in Northwest Review, Poet Lore, and The Rumpus, and has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Monson Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. A PhD student at the University of Utah, he lives in Salt Lake City.