TUPELO PRESS PROUDLY ANNOUNCES THE RESULTS OF THE 2026 BERKSHIRE PRIZE

Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge, Beth Bachmann, has selected diving by Monica Kim of Brooklyn, New York as the winner of the 2026 Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry. Monica Kim will receive a $3,000 cash prize, in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 20 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and international distribution with energetic publicity and promotion. All manuscripts were judged anonymously.

Monica Kim (she/her) is a queer Korean diaspora writer living on Canarsie & Munsee Lenape land (Brooklyn, New York). She won the inaugural Jane Kenyon Chapbook Prize Award in 2020 and The Blue Mountain Review Asian American Chapbook Award in 2021. She is a first reader at Augur Magazine and has been part of Tin House Summer Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Periplus Collective, and The Watering Hole. Her writing has appeared in Sho Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast Journal, Honey Literary, and other publications; you can find more of her work at www.monicakimwrites.com.

Finalists for the 2026 Berkshire Prize

목 | mok by Erik Julian Baker of New York, New York.

collective by Katie Berta of Tempe, Arizona.

The Advent Lyrics by Will Brewbaker of Durham, North Carolina.

Occasions of Origin by Xinyue Huang of New York, New York.

Phantom Ride by Lauren Myers-Hinkle of Chicago, Illinois.

#TheRebelSonnets by Bino Realuyo of New York, New York.

Semifinalists for the 2026 Berkshire Prize

Bystander by Talia Bloch of Brooklyn, New York.

Ofrenda by Anaïs Deal-Márquez of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Not This by Josh English of Montclair, New Jersey.

Stereopsis by Ananda Lima of Chicago, Illinois.

Where the Fruit Gets Its Shape by Noreen Ocampo of Oxford, Mississippi.

We Shot Moon Rabbit by Daniel Ooi of Abilene, Texas.

KAMA'ĀINA by Lana Reeves of Nashville, Tennessee.

Orange Blossom Sugar: The Story of Marie Lafarge by Emily Wilson of Asheville, North Carolina.

Enormous thanks as well to our terrific readers and judge, Beth Bachmann.

Beth Bachmann is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and the author of three books from the Pitt Poetry Series: Temper, winner of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Donald Hall Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Do Not Rise, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and CEASE, winner of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize. Her fiction has been selected by Danielle Evans as winner of The Kenyon Review’s 2023 Short Fiction Contest, by Jamil Jan Kochai as winner of the 2023 Zoetrope Short Fiction Competition, and by Karen Russell as second-place winner of the 2023 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Beth grew up outside Philadelphia and earned degrees from the John Hopkins Writing Seminars and Concordia University in Montreal. For many years, she served as Writer in Residence in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University and now divides her time between Nashville and New York City, where she is at work on her first novel.

Our heart-felt gratitude goes out to all who sent us your manuscripts and who, by your writing, link arms in the tireless, solitary, and so-important work of making poetry. So many more manuscripts than we can mention here gave us countless hours of reading pleasure.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we hope you will consider letting us see your full-length manuscript again, as our annual Summer Open Reading Period is currently open until August 31st. Thank you and we look forward to reading your work!