The American Poetry Review is happy to announce that the 2027 APR/Honickman First Book Prize will be judged by Terrance Hayes.

Terrance Hayes’s newest books include a collection of poems, So To Speak (Penguin, 2023), a collection of essays, Watch Your Language (Penguin, 2023), American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University. 

The prize of $3,000, with an introduction by the judge and distribution of the winning book by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium, will be awarded in 2027 with publication of the book in the same year. The author will receive a standard book publishing contract, with royalties paid in addition to the $3,000 prize.

Learn more & submit your work here.