Opening the archive
Selector archive · 2006—2025
National Book Award for Poetry selections, presented by recognition year. Each entry links to the selector’s first-party record.
Showing 1–20 of 20
New and selected poems address Black life, history, family, disaster, violence, and survival in vivid voices.
Poems scrutinize the language surrounding Palestine, displacement, family memory, media, and ongoing war.
A multilingual poetic sequence considers CHamoru identity, fatherhood, militarization, ecology, and Guam's colonial status.
New and selected poems move through Black and queer history, music, art, love, and political struggle.
Narrative poems honor migrants, workers, family, and resistance while confronting racism and public indifference.
Documentary poetry, photographs, translation, and testimony examine Korean history, war, borders, and U.S. power.
Precise, associative poems connect ordinary perception with science, landscape, time, and global ecological change.
Formally disruptive poems confront anti-Blackness, queerness, violence, desire, and the policing of bodies.
Five decades of dramatic and lyric poems explore desire, guilt, art, identity, and moral conflict.
Surreal, documentary-inflected poems address borders, bureaucracy, labor, violence, and dehumanizing political language.
Poems examine Black womanhood and art history, including a long work assembled from museum-object titles.
Dreamlike poems follow an aging artist through childhood memories, solitude, creativity, and approaching death.
Formally varied poems revisit the Annunciation while considering faith, womanhood, motherhood, and contemporary life.
Original poems and translations contemplate aging, loss, classical literature, and the instability of memory.
Poems confront Black history, public catastrophe, intimacy, and political spectacle with dramatic precision.
Inventive lyrics combine music, race, desire, family, and American popular culture in shifting forms.
Three sequences assemble spare, fragmented language into philosophical meditations on perception, absence, and being.
New and selected poems consider beauty, mortality, desire, grief, animals, and the observed world.
Meditative poems move between war, art, landscape, domestic life, and the responsibilities of witness.
Three linked poetic sequences use jazzlike variation to explore exile, spirit, memory, and collective identity.
