“Those Winter Sundays” that poet and LSA alum Robert Hayden wrote about are finally making way for days of alternating rain and sunshine, red-breasted robins, and fragrant lilac blooms. Spring is here, and as National Poetry Month wraps up, we’re celebrating seven recent LSA poetry books.

  • Helen Zell Writers’ Program (HZWP) alum Derrick Austin (M.F.A. ’14) was awarded the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for his second collection of poems, Tenderness, and his work has been nominated for prestigious honors such as the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Golden Poppy Award, and a Northern California Book Award. Austin’s latest collection, This Elegance, “engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione—‘sacred conversation’—a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space,” and will be published by Boa Editions May 2026.
  • Furious Harvests by acclaimed Ukrainian poet Alex Averbuch, also an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, was translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky for Harvard University Press in 2026. The book transports readers to Averbuch’s eastern Ukraine home, “reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples,” amid the devastation of war.
  • Current HZWP student Kameryn Alexa Carter (’27) published her debut poetry collection, Antediluvian, with the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2026. Written during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Antediluvian takes on themes of both agoraphobia and ecstasy, and holds a conversation with “a constellation of artists.”
  • Taps, written by HZWP alum [and lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature] Joseph Harms (’18), was published by Todos Contentos y Yo También Press in 2025. Poet and Residential College professor Laura Kasischke writes of Harms’s collection: “This is not poetry for the timid. There are magical incantations here, hallucinatory evocations of ordinary experience that will change the way a reader sees and thinks, hears and wonders.”
  • HZWP alum Rebecca Hawkes’s (’24) debut, Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press 2022), is full of flesh, both erotic and bovine, and described by the publisher as “tender and brutal, seductive and repulsive … introduces a compelling new mode of hardcore pastoral.”
  • Isabel Neal, an HZWP alum (’20), is the 120th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, awarded for her 2026 book Thrown Voice. Poet Claudia Rankine calls Neal’s work “genius,” and writes, “These exceptional poems turn back on themselves, redefining what might be.”
  • Award-winning poet Rachel Richardson (HZWP ’04) takes on motherhood, California wildfires, and climate change in her 2025 collection Smother (W.W. Norton, 2025). Poet Carrie Fountain calls Smother “a guide, a dare, a prayer, and a miracle.”