Former IASH Fellow Professor Marianne Boruch has won the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize. Prof. Boruch was the 2012 Fulbright Scotland Distinguished Scholar and later contributed to the Dangerous Women Project, with her poem 'Women' published in our 2021 volume The Art of Being Dangerous (Leuven University Press).
The citation from judges Major Jackson, Cole Swensen and Afaa Michael Weaver stated:
In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought. In an age of simulated intelligence, Boruch sets to tremble the whole of our collective knowledge where the soul, as she suggests in several poems, is a vastness of wanting and boundless curiosity. And thus, her poetry possesses an amazing range. Her tone slips adroitly from elegant phrasing to jaunty repartee, and over the course of her work, she has employed every register in between, often with moments of slightly unexpected syntax—not startling but awakening...
With the compassion and reverence that comes with the pursuit of emptiness, Boruch also examines two of the most important and confounding issues of our time, the health of the natural world and the spiritual contexts of our uninhabited bodies. What is this vehicle we use to live our lives, and are we willing to lend our real attention to people such as the Indigenous Elders who take the stewardship of this gift of life seriously? It is Boruch’s keen intelligence and genuine concern that takes her to this work and brings back to us these gems that do not shrink from frankness, as she looks everywhere for what can help us see. To read Boruch is to constantly look up with eyes a little more widely open and think, yes!
The Jackson Poetry Prize honors an American poet of exceptional talent. It was established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation and is named for the John and Susan Jackson family. Previous honorees include Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo and Sandra Lim.
An extract from Prof. Boruch's poem 'Women':
We all die, said the priest about my mother
but that’s in another life.
See? What you write, writes you back. What I find
puts me in the flames of hell
all over again grateful
or in that first backyard of weeds and brave grass,
some ivy weaving a wall.
Text copyright Marianne Boruch.