The Georgia Review congratulates Jane Huffman, who was selected by judge Brian Teare as the winner of this year’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Huffman will receive an honorarium of $1,500 for her poem “Almanac,” which will be published in our Spring 2027 issue.
Of Huffman’s poem, Teare wrote:
“The late poet and critic Hilary Gravendyk—who lived with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis—coined the term ‘chronic poetics’ to describe a specific tradition of disability poetry whose signal themes are duration, chronicity, and pain. I believe Jane Huffman to be a powerful new participant in this tradition, and ‘Almanac’ to be a wholly original articulation of her own experience of duration, chronicity, and pain. Fittingly, Huffman employs almanac as a noun: divided into twelve sections of sixteen lines each (except for #9, which has seventeen), with each line measuring between one and seven syllables (though most are from three to five), the poem counts out a year of living with a chronic illness that affects the lungs. The result is a moving lyric sequence full of expert tonal modulations effected through surprising syntactical maneuvers, each one supported by rigorous yet subtle prosodic design. Also fittingly, Huffman deploys almanac as a verb: she orders the seasons of her lungs in approximate correspondence to the seasons of the world. The result is a fractured calendar of breathing, medicalization, treatments, therapies, and the constraints chronic illness places upon life and art. The way it keeps time makes the poem’s keen crip humor, the kind that converts chronicity into wit, particularly poignant: late in the sequence Huffman quips, ‘My only subject / is exhaustion, / and I’m tired of it.’ Across twelve months, this poet’s wry, wise mind weathers enmeshment with its only body, her poem inviting us ever deeper into this fundamentally humbling relation, the one that always ‘makes me / and of me / a beginner.’”
Jane Huffman is the author of Dilemma, forthcoming in 2027 from Vanderbilt University Press, and Public Abstract (American Poetry Review, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, The Nation, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Huffman is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She teaches for the low-residency MFA at Warren Wilson and online.
We would like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. More information about the contest is available here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Loraine Williams Poetry Prize opens again in March 2027.
The Loraine Williams Poetry Prize 2026
Winner: “Almanac” by Jane Huffman
Finalists:
“Childhood Lawn” by Pio Arango
“Roseland” by Cortney Lamar Charleston
“Center for Wildlife” by Stephanie Horvath
“As a Child” by Kyle Okeke
“Euthanasia Log” by josé ramirez-garcia
“Palinode” by Lee Trumpfheller
“Like a Gleaner” by Lindsey Webb