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

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.

Shlagha Borah

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

Adedayo Agarau

A brown skinned man is seated, leaning forward, gazing at the camera. He wears glasses and a white sweater.

Wednesday March 25, 11:30am - 12:30pm ET

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Adedayo Agarau is a Nigerian poet, editor, and educator. His debut collection, The Years of Blood, won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. Among his chapbooks are Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). Agarau is fluent in English, Pidgin, and Yoruba. His work explores themes of migration, cultural memory, and postcolonial identity.

Marcella Durand

A white skinned woman with shoulder-length curly hair, wearing glasses and a black top, smiles at the camera.

Wednesday April 15, 11:30am - 12:30pm ET

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Marcella Durand is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work explores intersections among ecology, science, art, and poetry. Durand's latest book, A Winter Triangle, winner of the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize (selected by Srikanth Reddy), was published in Fall 2025 by Fordham University Press. Her other books include Area (Belladonna, 2008); Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem Books, 2008); Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017); and Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.) (joca seria, 2016), with French translations by Olivier Brossard. With Jennifer Firestone, Durand edited Other Influences, an anthology of original essays by avant-garde feminist poets on their influences. She lives in New York City.