This week in our poetry news round up we look at the death of the writer Annie Dillard and the announcement of this year’s National Book Award for Poetry longlist.
Annie Dillard Passes Away Aged 81
Annie Dillard during an interview at her home, January 24, 1983. (Bob Child / AP)
Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer whose very first published book was a collection of poems, has died at the age of 81. She died on Tuesday 15th September at her home in South Wellfleet, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh in 1945, Dillard took both her BA and her MA at Hollins College in Virginia. Her master’s thesis was on Walden and Thoreau, a choice that would shadow her reputation for the next fifty years. She wrote and published poetry as an undergraduate and carried on concentrating on it after graduating, and it was poetry rather than prose that gave her a debut. Tickets for a Prayer Wheel appeared in 1974, a slim book of poems built around a search for spiritual knowledge, and it opened with a line about a wood duck at Tinker Creek.
A few months later came Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the book that made her famous. A first-person account of a year spent watching the natural world in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, it won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and turned its author, then still in her twenties, into a cultural phenomenon. Critics reached straight away for comparisons with Thoreau and hailed her as a twentieth-century Walden-dweller; others have since set her alongside Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Blake for the compression and strangeness of her sentences.
She went on to publish more than ten books, among them Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, An American Childhood, The Writing Life and the novels The Living and The Maytrees, her final book, which appeared in 2007. She returned to verse in 1995 with Mornings Like This, a set of found poems assembled out of other people’s prose. Dillard was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in the late 1970s before spending some two decades teaching in the English department at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, retiring as professor emerita in 2002. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal in recognition of that career, receiving it at the White House in September 2015.
2026 National Book Award for Poetry Longlist Announced
The National Book Foundation has revealed the ten contenders for this year’s National Book Award for Poetry, announcing the longlist on Wednesday 16th September in partnership with The New Yorker. The ten titles were selected from 285 books submitted by their publishers.
Four of the ten poets have been recognized by the award before. Victoria Chang was longlisted in 2020 for Obit, Brenda Hillman in 2013 for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, while Fady Joudah was a finalist in 2024 and Layli Long Soldier a finalist in 2017 for WHEREAS. Four of this year’s titles come from independent publishers and three from university presses, and among the longlisted poets are a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the current Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation.
The full longlist is Victoria Chang’s Tree of Knowledge, Carolina Ebeid’s Hide, Brenda Hillman’s Still House in the Desert, Richie Hofmann’s The Bronze Arms, Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G, Layli Long Soldier’s We, Jonah Mixon-Webster’s Promise/Threat, Jake Rose’s JOAN, Jake Skeets’s Horses and Susan Stewart’s Bramble.
Judging this year’s poetry award are Rob Arnold, Jon Pineda, Roger Reeves and Rosanna Warren, with Aracelis Girmay as chair. The finalists in all five categories will be announced on 6th October, and the winners revealed at the 77th National Book Awards ceremony in New York on 18th November.
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