24 of the Best Award-Winning Poetry Books

Duende (2007) won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Tracy K. Smith served as Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. “Duende” refers to passion and inspiration. This collection speaks to history, current events, and political resistance, and celebrates cultures that have been ignored and suppressed.

All of It Singing (2008) won the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. The collection gathers together more than 30 years of Gregg’s poetry, including poems from six previous books as well as new ones.

One With Others (2010) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. It mixes journalism, history, and poetry to explore an incident in the Civil Rights movement in Arkansas. Wright draws on oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper articles, and memories.

Head Off & Split (2010) won the National Book Award for Poetry. This collection is in dialogue with important African American figures and events. Finney writes about Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, victims of Hurricane Katrina, among others.

Stag’s Leap (2012) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Its sequence of poems tells the story of the speaker’s divorce, moving through the end of the marriage into the emotional aftermath. It’s an open, honest, generous portrait of one of life’s most disruptive events.

Poems 1962–2012 (2012) won the Los Angeles Times Poetry Book Award. Glück also won the 2020 Nobel Prize. This collection gathers together 50 years of her poetry, showing the range and importance of her work. It includes 11 of her previously published works.

Red Doc> (2013) won the Griffin Poetry Prize, a prize from Canada with an award specifically for Canadian writers (which Carson is). It’s a follow-up to Carson’s novel in verse The Autobiography of Red, picking up the story of Geryon, now called “G,” and his fate 15 years later. It’s a genre-bending prose poem based on Greek myths.

Citizen (2014) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Rankine writes about racial aggressions and the toll they take on Black citizens in the U.S. The collection is an innovative mix of poetry, essay, and image.

Book of Hours (2014) won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academic of American Poets as well as the Donald Justice Award. It’s a collection about grief, loss, and renewal. The short poems, divided into five sections, explore the death of the speaker’s father as well as the birth of his son.

From the New World (2015) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry. It collects almost four decades of writing, including poems from 11 books from Graham, who is also a Pulitzer Prize winner. The poems are wide-ranging but cover living in social and ecological crisis in particular.

Falling Awake (2016) won the Costa Award for Poetry, an award that recognizes writers based in Britain and Ireland. It also was the international winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The poems in this collection explore nature and change, often drawing on Greek mythology to do so. Orpheus and Tithonus bookend the collection.

Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016) was the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn award, and the Forward Prize. Vuong’s poems cover his Vietnamese heritage, family life, war, the body, sexuality, and violence. It’s his first full-length collection.

The Performance of Becoming Human (2016) won the National Book Award for Poetry. This collection touches on themes of borders, immigration, and political and economic injustice. It’s about what it means to be human in the face of institutions and institutionalized violence.

Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize. Smith’s poems meditate on the the effects of police brutality and on racism and homophobia more generally. They look at black, queer life in the U.S. and living with HIV.

Whereas (2017) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN/Jean Stein Award. It’s a book that speaks to the U.S. government’s treatment of Native American peoples and the duplicitous language that is a part of that history. It’s also formally innovative, using prose poetry to explore language and history.

The Carrying (2018) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The collection contains poems on daily life that also touch on creativity, fertility, loss, passion, politics, and more. The poems are vivid and lush, full of the natural world and deeply-felt emotion.

Deaf Republic (2019) won the Los Angeles Times Poetry Book Prize. It tells a story of soldiers in an unnamed, occupied town who kill a young boy who is deaf. The sound of the gunshot makes the whole town lose their hearing. The book describes the townspeople’s dissent and heroism in response to violence.

The Tradition (2019) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. The collection explores fatherhood, queerness, trauma, freedom, Blackness, and more. It’s also formally innovative, introducing a new form called the duplex, which combines the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues.

A Fortune for Your Disaster (2019) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. It’s a wide-ranging collection that takes up heartbreak, loss, forgiveness, memory, race, and much more. Abdurraqib brings the collection together with repeated titles such as “How Can Black People Write About Flowers At a Time Like This,” and poems on Marvin Gaye and Nikola Tesla.

Sight Lines (2019) won the National Book Award for Poetry. This collection contains poems on transformation and change, on the beauty of nature, and on threats of ecological destruction. The formally innovative poems work using associative logic, moving from image to image to create a moving whole.

Obit (2020) won the Los Angeles Times Poetry Book Prize and the PEN Voelcker Award. The collection is a series of obituaries written in response to her mother’s death and her father’s illness. Through these obituaries, Chang mourns the many, varied things she has lost and explores the experience of loss itself.

Postcolonial Love Poem (2020) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021. The poems in this collection look at desire, bodies, language, water, and land. Diaz writes about indigenous people’s present and past. The poems are erotic and political, full of love, sex, grief, and joy.

Be Holding (2020) won the PEN/Jean Stein Award. It’s a book-length poem that begins in basketball as a celebration of Julius Erving’s famous baseline scoop. It moves on to photography, family, the Middle Passage, flying, the ethics of looking, and more.

DMZ Colony (2020) won the National Book Award for Poetry. It’s a hybrid work combining poetry, prose, photographs, and drawings that explore the nature of borders. It looks at colonialism, storytelling, translation, the histories of North and South Korea, and the author’s family history of migration.