William Carlos Williams Award - 2026

Alan Gilbert on Diana Arterian

An initial reading of Diana Arterian’s powerful Agrippina the Younger might understand it as a research-driven resuscitation of a Roman noblewoman’s life. But circulating beneath this like the blood so frequently shed in the book’s poems is a dark and at times unflinching depiction of the violence flowing through almost any political system, one that also doesn’t spare its overlords and overladies, however much more pervasively directed at its plebs.

Narrating a history of early dynastic Rome in a mix of poetry and prose, Agrippina the Younger makes it clear, without being didactically explicit, how much this violence is still with us and how insane a ruler can be. Yes, this brutality is rooted in what is now called toxic masculinity, but the women of Agrippina the Younger have imbibed it too, including its eponymous empress and mother

The historical succession of deaths, murders, and betrayals begins to feel inexorable with each turning page (and the millennia since), yet Arterian’s carefully crafted poems are nuanced to the details of everyday life and interspersed with moments of compassion. After all, from her birth on the frontiers of the Roman Empire in 15 CE, Agrippina the Younger was always fighting for her life: “I want her to have / power of command here too // to slow the inevitable / down to tenderness.” Threaded into this narrative is Arterian’s personal archeological search for hidden histories and the voice and forms with which to express them.

​*
Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press) and editor and co-translator of Smoke Drifts (World Poetry Books), a collection of Nadia Anjuman's poetry. Arterian’s first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Poetry Foundation Staff Pick. A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press and twice-finalist for the National Poetry Series, Arterian's creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Millay Arts, and Yaddo, and her writing has been featured by The Academy of American Poets, BOMB, NPR, New York Times Book Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub and lives in Los Angeles.

* * * 
Finalists

Sophia Dahlin, Glove Money (Nightboat Books)
Read a poem from the collection

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Wayward Creatures (Host Publications)
Read a poem from the collection

Keith S. Wilson, Games for Children (Milkweed Editions)
Read a poem from the collection

*
About the Finalists

Sophia Dahlin is a poet in Berkeley, where she leads generative poetry workshops, teaches youth creative writing, and, with seven other poets, curates a weekly reading series at Tamarack, Oakland. Glove Money is her second full-length collection; her first, Natch, was published in 2020 by City Lights Books.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker, and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are the author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. They live in Tongva lands, otherwise known as Southern California.

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Wilson’s book Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love was recognized by The New York Times as a best new book of poetry. He lives in Chicago.