Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

2026 STAN AND TOM WICK POETRY PRIZE

$2,500 for a First Book of Poems

This prize is offered annually to a poet who has not previously published a full-length collection of poems. The prize awards the winner with $2,500 and publication of their first full-length book of poetry by the �Ը�� University Press. The winner and the competition's judge will give a reading together on the �Ը�� campus.

The 2025 winner was Oil Courses by Carolyn Williams-Noren selected by Pádraig Ó Tuama

The 2026 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize judge is Camille Dungy

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster: May 2, 2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.

First Book Archive

ENTRY REQUIREMENTS:

The competition is open to poets writing in English who have not yet published a full-length collection of poems including self-published collections with a run of under 100.
There is a $27 reading fee.
Submissions must consist of 50 to 80 pages of poetry, with no more than one poem included on a page.
The poet's name or identifying information must not appear on the manuscript.
Include one title page with the manuscript title only. List all other contact information in the "cover letter" box of the submissions manager. Entries are judged anonymously. If any identifying information is found in the manuscript, including publication information or identifying dedications or notes, the manuscript will be disqualified.
Do not include an acknowledgments page. If an acknowledgments page is included in the manuscript, the manuscript will be disqualified.
The manuscript may be submitted simultaneously to other publishers, but the poet must notify the Wick Poetry Center immediately if the manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere.
A winner will be announced in the fall of 2026

�Ը��