Events

This event is free and open to the public.

Join us for the 2026 Tufts Poetry Award Reading & Reception at the Los Angeles Public Library, where we’ll honor our Kate Tufts Award Winner and our Kingsley Tufts Award.

About our judges:

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems, The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, which won a Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems.. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. Jackson is a recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson’s poems and essays have been published in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London and many distinguished journals. He currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. He recently completed a 2-season post (443 episodes!) hosting The Slowdown poetry podcast.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, (forthcoming in Fall 2025!), The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has also received an NEA fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Kelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City.

Ed Pavlić is an American writer whose work travels across—often blurring—genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and scholarship. Centered in African American and diasporic life and culture, most of his work explores racial dynamics in the experiences of persons—fictive, actual, historical and contemporary—whose placement and perspectives aren’t neatly classifiable in contemporary vocabularies, theirs or ours. His awards include The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Award (2001), The National Poetry Series Open Competition (2012, 2014), The Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writer’s Association (2009, 2023), and the Darwin Turner Memorial Award from African American Review (1997). He is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia and lives in Athens, GA with his family.

Francine J Harris’ most recent book of poetry is Here is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, said “no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet’s voice.” Her second book, play dead (Alice James, 2017) won a LAMBDA Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, and was nominated for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Her debut collection, Allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012) was a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Poetry, Meridian, Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Boston Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,the MacDowell Colony, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Cave Canem.

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Forthcoming are a memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies including Poetry, Best American Poetry, spin.com, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Born in West Texas and raised in Metropolitan Detroit, Francis, along with composer Jonathan Berger and artist Enrico Riley, wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath. She received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. She has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a Kresge Fellowship. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.