The Georgia Review is proud to announce its inaugural Emerging Poetry Critics Program. Created to address the need for robust and ongoing infrastructure for long-form poetry criticism in public and literary outlets, to encourage early-career poetry critics through material support and mentorship, and to affirm criticism’s indispensability as literature’s essential counterpart, the Program pairs two established critic mentors with two early-career critic fellows.
With support from the National Endowment for the Arts, each fellow will receive $2,000 and will publish two pieces of poetry criticism, to be featured in The Georgia Review and in the pages of one of our distinguished magazine partners: AGNI, The American Poetry Review, and ZYZZYVA. Through meaningful collaboration with multiple literary platforms, the Program aims to widen access to current avenues for poetry criticism, enriching and extending the life of both a book and its readers.
We are also pleased to share our inaugural cohort. Sandra Simonds and Christopher Spaide, both notable and dynamic poets, critics, and teachers, will serve as mentors. Our 2026–27 Fellows, chosen for their demonstrated promise as meaningful contributors to the critical landscape, are Sarah Ahmad and antmen pimentel mendoza. Across the year, Ahmad and mendoza will pitch, draft, revise, and transmit two reviews under the guidance of the mentors, who will offer their invaluable perspectives on professionalization and publishing along the way.
The Georgia Review is thrilled to invest in poetry criticism, and we look forward to the crucial work this program will steward. You can read more about our mentors and fellows below.
Sandra Simonds is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Burning Oracle (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) and Triptychs (Wave Books, 2022), which was a New York Times selection. Simonds has taught at Thomas University, Bennington College, Florida State University, and the University of Montana. Much of her writing focuses on capitalism, class, ecology, and gender through avant-garde experiments with genre and form. Her awards include the University of Akron Poetry Prize and the Cleveland State University Open Poetry Prize. Her first novel, Assia (Noemi Press, 2023), won the Vermont Book Award in Fiction and was shortlisted for the Dzanc Fiction Prize. Her poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and others. She was the recipient of the Reader’s Choice Award from the Academy of American Poets and is currently working on a book of experimental essays that are a hybrid of memoir, journalism, and literary criticism.
Christopher Spaide is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His academic writing on modern and contemporary poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays, reviews, and poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, and The Yale Review, and he has been a poetry columnist for the Poetry Foundation and Literary Hub. He has received fellowships from the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Harvard Society of Fellows, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation; for his academic writing and criticism, he has received prizes from Post45 and The Sewanee Review. Currently, he serves as the secretary for the Wallace Stevens Society. He is the literary executor for Helen Vendler.
Sarah Ahmad was born in Delhi and grew up across the Indian subcontinent. She is a PhD candidate in literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she works on the ways anticolonial, feminist-queer, and Third World intellectuals and writers imagine housing against empire. Her creative work also circles around space, architecture, homes, and a poetics of the domestic. She teaches courses on gender, space, and power in the English and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies departments at UMass, and has edited and worked for Guernica, Poetry, and Conjunctions. Her work can be found in Latin American Literature Today, The Margins, Gulf Coast, and the minnesota review, among other places.
antmen pimentel mendoza is a writer and educator based in Oakland, California. mendoza is the author of the chapbook My Boyfriend Apocalypse (Nomadic Press, 2023; reprinted by Black Lawrence Press). Their poetry has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, New Delta Review, and Cream City Review and is anthologized in Best New Poets. They have received support from the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and Kundiman and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.