Announcing the 2026 Adroit Prizes for Poetry and Prose Results!

Peter LaBerge

2 hours ago

The editors of The Adroit Journal are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2026 Adroit Prizes for Poetry & Prose.

The Adroit Prizes are awarded annually to two students of secondary or undergraduate status. We’re fortunate to receive exceptional work from emerging writers in high school and college, and the best of the best will be recognized by the Adroit Prizes.

The 2026 Adroit Prize for Poetry was judged by Leila Chatti, while the 2026 Adroit Prize for Prose was judged by Karissa Chen.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Karissa Chen is the author of Homeseeking, a Good Morning America Book Club pick and Book of the Month pick. She is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, People, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as multiple writing residencies, including at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen Magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan.

2026 Adroit Prize Winners:

Shnayjaah Valentine Jeanty is a fourth-year at Columbia University, a 2026 Jack McCarthy Book Prize Winner, and a 2024 U.S. Youth Poet Laureate of the South. She likes New York except when it’s hot and stinky, or when it’s cold and un-stinky, which is to say she will probably live there for a very long time.

Adelaide Sendlenski was born in New York and raised in Sydney, Australia. Her poetry has been featured in The Slowdown and recognized as a National Scholastic Gold Medalist for Writing Portfolio, as a National YoungArts Winner, and as a New York State and New York City Youth Poet Laureate Finalist. Her emerging literary magazine, The Antigone Project, empowers a range of young adult voices in the Classics. She also runs a program at the Brooklyn Public Library, MythoKids, which fuses mythology and literacy for elementary school children.

2026 Adroit Prize Runners-Up:

2026 Adroit Prize Finalists:

2026 Adroit Prize Semifinalists:

2026 Adroit Prize Commended Writers:

Stay tuned for next year’s Adroit Prizes, which will open in early spring 2027! Click here sign up for updates!