Awards
Annual Awards
The PSA's Annual Awards are among the most prestigious honors available to poets. They offer emerging and established poets recognition at all stages of their careers, including our student poetry award and book awards for publishers.
Poetry Society of America Book Award | 2026
Norma Farber First Book Award, $500
For a first book of original poetry written by a living author who lives in the United States or is a U.S. citizen. The book must be published in either a hard or soft cover in a standard edition in 2025. Translations are ineligible, as are chapbooks. A $500 cash prize goes to the author.
Judge
Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023) named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong, and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks and has received numerous awards, including from the Poetry Foundation and the Oxford Poetry Society. Her writing has been commissioned by The United Nations and other institutions, and her poetry has been featured on a Louis Vuitton trunk for the Visionaries campaign, as well as in the Van Cleef & Arpels Spring Festival. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of a department bursary for exceptional merit, and previous degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU.
Established by the family and friends of Norma Farber, poet and author of children's books.
William Carlos Williams Award, $500
For a book of poetry written by a living author who lives in the United States or is a U.S. citizen. The book must be published by a small press, non-profit, or university press in a standard edition in 2025. Translations are ineligible, as are chapbooks. A $500 cash prize goes to the author.
Judge
Alan Gilbert is the author of four books of poetry, including the ongoing epic poem, The Everyday Life of Design. Gilbert is also the author of a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. He is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2006 Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature. He is the website editor for BOMB Magazine and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Columbia University MFA Writing Program.
Endowed by the family and friends of Geraldine Clinton Little, a poet and author of short stories and former vice-president of the PSA.
Submission Details
- Books must be submitted directly by publishers.
- There is a $20 entry fee per book.
- Publishers must submit 2 copies of each title.
- No book may be submitted to both contests.
- Books should be sent via USPS.
- Submissions from Poetry Society employees, officers, advisory board committee members, or their immediate families are ineligible.
Mailing Address
Poetry Society of America
119 Smith Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Four Quartets Prize
The Four Quartets Prize is for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book.
Chapbook Fellowships
Launched in 2003, the PSA's Chapbook Program publishes each winner's work as a gorgeous chapbook, allowing new voices to reach new audiences.
Frost & Shelley Awards
The Frost Medal and Shelley Memorial Award recognize lifetime and mid-career achievement in poetry. By nomination only.