Poet and Scholar Juliana Spahr (SHC Fellow '21) Awarded Pulitzer Prize

A professor of English at Mills College at Northeastern University, Spahr won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her recent collection, “Ars Poeticas,” a politically charged meditation on poetry’s role in what she describes as “dark times.”

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The Pulitzer Prize committee wrote that “Ars Poeticas” “takes stock of her personal disillusionment, which she uses to interrogate her relationship to her art form, community and politics.” The committee this year consisted of poets Tracey K. Smith, D.A. Powell, Camille Dungy, J. Michael Martinez and Elizabeth Willis. “Ars Poeticas” was published in 2025 by Wesleyan Poetry Series. 

Spahr was Marta Sutton Weeks External Fellow at the Humanities Center in 2020–21.

Read the New York Times announcement