IndiaAIFounders — Here is the 2026 National Book Award Shortlist for Poetry

Just last month, the National Book Award judges announced their longlists for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. Today, they’ve shared their shortlists for each of these categories.

The awards will be presented at the National Book Award Ceremony and Dinner in November, when finalists will be awarded $1,000 each, and the winners of each category will win $10,000 and a bronze medal.

Here are the five books on the shortlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry, along with what critics, authors, and the National Book Awards are saying about them.

Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang

“Like af Klint’s artworks, Chang’s poems are vibrant and conceptually deep.” —The Cincinnati Review

“Chang writes in both absolutes and inquiries as she artfully taps into what it means to be human while parsing through both personal and collective histories.” —Mother Jones

Hide by Carolina Ebeid

“It adds up to a memorable and skillful excavation of identity and inheritance.” —Publishers Weekly

“Carolina Ebeid interlaces American English, Palestinian Arabic, and Cuban Spanish as she excavates memories—of her Palestinian father and Cuban mother’s forced migrations—in order to reconstruct her own ancestry and chart her path forward.” —National Book Awards

Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation by Brenda Hillman

“Brenda Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-20th century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other.” —National Book Awards

Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza by Fady Joudah

“FADY JOUDAH’S SIXTH collection of poems…, animated by repetition and contradiction, is stunning in its refusal to indulge categorical imperatives.” —The L.A. Review of Books

“Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G is among the first of its kind. The multimedia poetry collection—assembled in the diaspora, and yet, across form, content, and voice, never anywhere but Gaza—charts Palestinian life under genocide.” —Bilal Urick, Lit Hub

Bramble by Susan Stewart

“Bramble evokes ballads, fairy tales, and the biblical book of Judges in a three-part contemplation on contradiction, entanglement, and struggle that explores personal suffering and change, applying that philosophy to the world around us.” —National Book Awards