The 21st Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

We are thrilled to announce that our contest judge, A.E. Stallings, has chosen Bitters by Christopher Childers as the winner of the 21st Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize! The Hecht Prize, established in 2005 to support emerging poets, awards $3,000 and publication by Waywiser Books.

Waywiser will publish Bitters in the spring of 2027, when Childers is scheduled to read at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

In addition to celebrating Childers’ work, we would like to acknowledge our finalists for the prize:

• J. Camp Brown, Slow of Speech and Tongue

• Gregory Calabro, The Masons

• Joseph Cuomo, What I Didn't See

• Kailey Dorfman, Turn

• Caitlin Doyle, The Winding Key

• Gabriella Fee, I Said Stay

• José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes, Distant Possessions

• Michael Rutherglen, Summer in Symmetry

We received over 400 submissions for this year’s contest, and our congratulations go not just to Christopher Childers and to those whose manuscripts reached the later stages of the contest, but to everyone else who entered. It is thanks to everyone who participated that the latest contest has been another big success.