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
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
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.
Click here for the 2024 UNT Rilke Prize press flyer.
Click here for the 2023 UNT Rilke Prize press flyer.
Click here for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize press flyer.
Click here for the 2015 UNT Rilke Prize press flyer.
Click here for the 2013 UNT Rilke Prize press flyer.
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