Advancing American Poetry & Poetics
We are a community of poets, scholars, students, and social justice workers who explore the power of poetry
to change the world for the better through acts of imagination and the energy of new languages and visions.
2025-2026 PJI Prize Winners
We are excited to announce that the winner of our 2025-2026 PJI Prize is Kaitlyn Airy and the winner of our 2025-2026 PJI Editor’s Prize is Shlagha Borah. Read below to learn more about them.
Kaitlyn Airy
Poetry Collection Title: Braid The Dark Hair She Gave You
Kaitlyn Airy is a Korean American poet and essayist. Her work explores international adoption, American labor history, ecological precarity, the Korean War and the rupture that continues in its wake. Raised on a small island in the Salish Sea, she currently lives in Charlottesville where she serves as a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia. Her work is found in FENCE, Poets.org, Poetry Online, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. In her spare time she enjoys consulting the oracle, tracking down patches of ghostpipes, and experimenting with fermentation.
PJI Prize Finalists
In no ranked order:
“Whatever You Expected” by Susie Meserve
Immortality Among Fruit Trees by Candice Reffe
Platypus Dream by Richard Prins
Black Shoal by Christopher Nelson
Slick by Destiny Crockett
The Decadent Movement by Laura Kolbe
Hysteria by Christine Robbins
Somewhere Horses by Jasmine Khaliq
Hollow Tree by Sarah Kortemeier
Free Time by Cameron Cocking
We are deeply grateful to our initial readers:
Tianyi Duanmu
Sara Hovda
Dong Li
Bo Hee Moon
Robin Walter
Shlagha Borah
Poetry Collection Title: daughterline
Shlagha Borah is from Assam, India. She is a 2026-2027 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Shenandoah, Epoch, and elsewhere. She is the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary and Deputy Editor at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Brooklyn Poets, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, and VCCA, among others. Her work is available at www.shlaghaborah.com. Instagram: @shlaghab
PJI Editor’s Prize Finalists
In no ranked order:
! [or the superblack exhibit]: poems by KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
Carne, 1970 by Krystal Vazquez
Colossus by O-Jeremiah Agbaakin
diasporous by Grace Zhou
In the Name of Yellow Leaves That Is My Country by Hera Naguib
Man Sold Separately by Monic Ductan
Moonful by Winshen Liu
Our Long Singing Necks by Kuhu Joshi
When You Want Talons by Jia-Rui Cook
Perish / Abolish by Mia Kang
Selected by Elisabeth Frost, with José Alvergue and JoAnne McFarland
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