This week in our poetry news round up we look at the death of the poet and feminist Robin Morgan and the announcement of the Poetry Foundation’s 2026 Pegasus Awards.
Poet and Feminist Robin Morgan Dies Aged 85
Photograph: Zuma Press Inc/Alamy
Robin Morgan, the poet, essayist and editor who became one of the defining figures of second-wave feminism, has died at the age of 85. She died at her home in New York on Saturday 5th September following a series of health problems in recent weeks, her son Blake Morgan confirmed. Her death came only days after that of her close friend and fellow campaigner Gloria Steinem.
Born in Florida in 1941 and raised in New York, Morgan was famous long before she was a poet. She had her own radio programme on WOR as a small child and went on to play Dagmar in the CBS series Mama, becoming one of the best-known child performers of the 1950s. She had wanted to write rather than act since she was four, and left the cast at fourteen to do exactly that. She studied as a non-matriculating student at Columbia and took a job as a secretary at the Curtis Brown literary agency, where she worked alongside W. H. Auden. Her poems were appearing in literary magazines by the time she was seventeen.
Her first collection, Monster, was published in 1972 and reviewed admiringly in the Washington Post by Adrienne Rich, who praised its vocabulary and its polish. The book also contained “Arraignment”, a poem in which Morgan accused Ted Hughes in connection with the death of Sylvia Plath. Lawsuits followed, the collection was banned in that form, and pirated feminist editions of it circulated underground for years afterwards.
Five further collections followed, among them Lady of the Beasts (1976), Depth Perception (1982), Upstairs in the Garden (1990) and A Hot January (1999). She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 1979 and held a residency at Yaddo the following year, working on a cycle of verse plays. Writing in Poetry, the critic Jay Parini predicted she would soon be regarded as one of America’s first-ranking poets.
She is, of course, better known for the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, which she compiled and introduced in 1970 and which the New York Public Library later named one of the hundred most influential books of the twentieth century. Two further volumes followed, in 1984 and 2003. She was editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine from 1989 to 1994, relaunching it as an advertisement-free international bimonthly, and in 2005 co-founded the Women’s Media Center with Steinem and Jane Fonda. She is widely credited with coining the word “herstory”. In all she published twenty-one books.
Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, she turned the experience into new poems and read a selection of them at TEDWomen in 2015. She was still working on new books and poems at the time of her death. She is survived by her son.
Poetry Foundation Announces 2026 Pegasus Awards
The Poetry Foundation has named the recipients of its 2026 Pegasus Awards, announced in Chicago on Wednesday 9th September and worth $195,000 in total across five prizes.
Robert Pinsky takes the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and its $100,000 purse. A three-term United States Poet Laureate and the founder of the Favorite Poem Project, Pinsky joins a list that begins with Adrienne Rich, who received the inaugural award in 1986 — this year marks its fortieth anniversary.
Elsewhere, Luis J. Rodriguez receives the $25,000 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, recognising a career that takes in the founding of Tia Chucha Press and a significant role in the Chicano Movement. Nikki Grimes, the author of more than a hundred books, has been appointed Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2027–28, a two-year post worth $50,000 that this year celebrates its own twentieth anniversary. Jason Schneiderman wins the $10,000 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism for Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, and Meg Day becomes the first recipient of the Pegasus Poetry Book Prize for the manuscript Sound Lasso. Run in partnership with Graywolf Press, that prize is open to poets aged forty or over for an unpublished first or second collection and comes with a residency at Ragdale.
The winners will be honoured at a private ceremony in Chicago in October. A free public Pegasus Awards Reading will be held at the Poetry Foundation on Friday 23rd October.
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