UNT Rilke Prize

ENTRIES FOR 2027 RILKE PRIZE

The UNT Rilke Prize awards $10,000 to a collection that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year. The prize is named after the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), a writer whose work embodies the qualities of ambition, intellectual and imaginative scope, and technical mastery we seek to recognize.

The submission period for the 2027 UNT Rilke Prize begins August 1, 2026 and closes November 30, 2026.

Submission Guidelines

• Entrants must have published at least two previous books of poetry.
• Work must be original poetry written in English.
• Eligible books must have been published between November 2025 and October 2026.
• Books may be submitted by presses or by writers themselves and must be postmarked by November 30, 2026.
• Each submission must include 3 copies of the book and a completed entry form.
• Chapbooks are not considered previous publications.
• Self-published books will not be considered.
• Books authored by friends or former students of the judges will not be considered.
• Finalists may be asked to submit further copies.
• No submission fee.
• Books will not be returned.

The winner will travel to UNT for a reading and book signing to be scheduled in Fall 2027. The author must also allow portions of the winning work to be reproduced for promoting the award. Poets who enter the prize must agree to these terms in order to accept the prize.

HOW TO SUBMIT?

Authors or publishers will mail completed entry form with three copies of the book submission to the address at the bottom of the form. Please download entry form here.

The UNT Rilke Prize was founded in 2011 and is offered by Creative Writing and the Department of English.

For questions or more info, contact UNTrilkeprize@unt.edu

2026 UNT RILKE PRIZE WINNER - CECILY PARKS

Cecily Parks's The Seeds (Alice James Books) has won the 2026 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. Parks will visit UNT on November 4th and 5th for a reading and book signing.

In her third collection, The Seeds, Cecily Parks's poems wander landscapes where the natural and the human overlap, trailing along a fence line, an alleyway, through a woods that is "parkland" and therefore "public," or a field that echoes with thought and experience. Her speaker turns a poet's and often a mother's eye to the infiltrated natural spaces that trouble her rich meditations, impelling her to negotiate how we can sustain hope in a world marked by beauty and plenty but also by corruption and pain. Always, the speaker's curiosity yields vivid accounts of the flora and fauna she encounters, whether in the wild or in her own yard. Sometimes, though, her curiosity is foiled, as when she recognizes that her children's "questions are the same" as her own "in that they have no answers, / though the lessons of damage / are everywhere." Still, such questions about endurance and survival enliven The Seeds, born of a mother's desire to confront and understand the damage scarring the world even as she attends to its abundance.

Click here for the 2026 UNT Rilke Prize press flyer.

2025 UNT Rilke Prize

Ishion Hutchinson - School of Instructions

Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) has won the 2025 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. Hutchinson is scheduled to visit UNT on October 8th and 9th for a reading and signing of his prize-winning book.

Hutchinson’s School of Instructions is a visionary exploration of coming-of-age and the memorializing of forgotten lives. The collection blends lyricism with research, the private and the personal intersecting with the brutal, far-reaching consequences of empire and of war. This ambitious, book-length poem twists together the story of young Godspeed, a boy growing up in Jamaica in the 1990s, with the lives of the West Indian soldiers who once served in British regiments in “the HOLY PLACES of EGYPT SINAI PALESTINE and of SYRIA” during the Great War. As Godspeed studies for exams and copes with the usual, small catastrophes of the school day, he discovers the larger world in the pages of an Encyclopedia Brittanica, “his eyes lunar and remote and full of years lightly borne with the breeze of history.” With great skill and subtlety, Hutchinson puts the reader inside Godspeed’s inquisitive mind while showing us simultaneously what it means for these soldiers—many of them barely old enough to be called men—to have received an education in “bayonet fighting and rapid firing.” Hutchinson shows readers the “wild butchery of souls…in the desert”; he demonstrates how learning such brutal history changes Godspeed’s sense of self. Ultimately, the purpose of School of Instruction is to record these soldiers’ deaths and to honor their lives, recovering them “for belated praise.”

2024 UNT Rilke Prize

Kevin Prufer - The Fears

Kevin Prufer's The Fears (Copper Canyon Press) has won the 2024 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. 

In The Fears, his ninth collection, Kevin Prufer examines how each of us becomes "a dying animal body," eventually losing what makes us human to sickness, grief, and even the indifference of the nation state. The poems place the ancient Greeks and Romans alongside vivdly rendered portraits of loved ones---a father dying of cancer, for instance---so that the epic, heroic past becomes a lens for meditating on the small, intimate tragedies of the present. And those intimate tragedies in turn yield ways of encountering the larger conflicts of our own historical moment. In lines that slide jaggedly across the page, Prufer moves between what he calls "mundanity" and "vastness," attempting to understand "the erasure of the self / into vastness" and, beyond that erasure, "the failures of empires." Bleak, clear-eyed, bracingly unsentimental, and insistent on the necessity of precise, accurate language, The Fears asks readers to remain politically engaged, to continue caring about the world. The poet urges us, even though we are mortal and will one day end up like Antigone, "nowhere," to keep paying attention to the vivid, haunting moments that comprise our lives: the broken finger of a mummy, a frozen bottle of wine, the "little pink tongue" of a lost kitten.

Click here for the 2024 UNT Rilke Prize press flyer.