Booking and details
Dates Tue, Feb 16, 2027 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, created in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht, is awarded annually for a poetry collection by a writer who has published no more than one book of poetry. This year’s prize will be given to Christopher Childers for his manuscript Bitters, to be published by Waywiser Press.
Acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator A.E. Stallings (National Book Critics Circle Award nominated Olives, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Like), selected this year’s winner and will read at the event.
This reading introduces a newer yet already celebrated poet to a larger audience. Recent winners include Anna Lena Phillips Bell (Might Could), Julia Thacker (To Wildness), Hannah Louise Poston (Julia Hungry), and James D’Agostino (The Goldfinch Caution Tapes).
Can’t join us in person? Purchase virtual access to a live streaming of the reading.
About the prize judge
A.E. Stallings
A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.