The Great Lakes Colleges Association is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 New Writers Award for Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Non-Fiction.  Since 1970, the New Writers Award confers recognition on promising writers who have published a first volume in one of the three genres. This award reflects outstanding literary achievement in the judgment of a committee of scholars-critics-writers who are faculty at GLCA member institutions.  Winning writers visit GLCA institutions by invitation to give readings, participate in discussions, and engage with students and faculty. 

The 2026 winner for Poetry is Tarik Dobbs, Nazar Boy:  poems, published by Haymarket Books. Our GLCA judges note:

Tarik Dobbs’ electric debut, Nazar Boy, is a searing indictment of imperial military surveillance that powerfully explores the intersections of Lebanese Arab experience, queerness, and disability.  Innovating and expanding on concrete and blackout poetry traditions, Dobbs contorts nostalgic nationalism and the sanitized language of state violence into shapes on the page.  His turn to the archival reanimates histories of violent oppression like the eugenics movement, which pathologized and persecuted vulnerable people in ways that ought to have created more solidarity among them. Refusing to forget, Dobbs registers these traumatic pasts in dense typographical palimpsests, revealing how the reverberations of the past in the present challenge any misconception that current political and cultural conditions are somehow “unprecedented”; rather, the accumulated layers of evidence are thick and sedimented in ways that only poetry can begin to slowly unpack. 

Behind these ominous elements, someone grows in touch with life’s violences, someone whose sensitivities become attuned to the world in such a way that they can speak witness to both the violence wreaked Palestine and the violence of immigration, while still reveling in the powers of experimentation with form.  These insightful poems ripple with threat, surveillance and its dangers, and the knowledge of what is wrought in the imbalances of power.  Throughout the book, the speaker makes visible the ableist, homophobic, and racist gazes that shape the contemporary landscape.  Dobbs’ experiments in form dazzle, both as intricate structures and as poems of substance. 

Judges of the Poetry Award were:
Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College)
Pablo Peschiera (Hope College)
Marlo Star (The College of Wooster)

The 2026 winner for Fiction is Alisa Alering, Smothermoss, published by Tin House.  Our GLCA judges note:

The mesmerizing prose of Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss brings the reader close to two sisters, Sheila and Angie, both social outsiders, and to the living ground of their Appalachian home.  Magical realism juxtaposes with the stark realities of the place – poverty, prejudice, human fragility, and brutality – to make for a lyrical, raw, tender, and sometimes gruesome tale that’s part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery.

In evocative language and striking imagery, Alering explores the relationships between sisters and mother and daughters, queerness, and community, among other topics. With touches of folklore and magical realism, the town of Smothermoss comes to vivid life.  Alering adeptly guides us through grotesque and fantastical enchantments, forbidden desires, and wounds both psychic and physical, in a place out of sight to many but alive with the mysterious forces of the natural world and the ways we are bound to them.  Eerie and beautiful, the novel creates a world that is both familiar and magical.  Smothermoss is a terrific debut from a writer to watch. 

Judges of the Fiction Award were:
Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine (Oberlin College)
Kari Kalve (Earlham College)
Chris White (DePauw University)

The 2026 winner for Creative Non-Fiction is Hala Alyan, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, published by Avid Reader Press.  Our GLCA judges note:

Hala Alyan’s I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a gorgeous, poetic memoir of surrogacy and exile that centers around the themes of conception and birth—of humans, stories, and worlds.  The book’s prose is fragmented, poetic, both brutal and tender, at times philosophical, at times mournful. Alyan uses fragments and myth to wend her way through a personal narrative that is inextricable from family and global tales to uniquely reveal a riveting, deeply emotional process of discovery for both the narrator and the reader.  Nothing about the waiting or the story is simple, though, and the threading of catastrophe across the Arab world and in her marriage leads to falling and spinning out and always a return to family, to what could be home. Ultimately, through unwinding and building, again and again, even through terrible destruction and patterns of behavior linked to larger entities, she—and we—are redeemed. 

Alyan elegantly weaves the threads of her family line—through war, displacement, alcoholism, and infertility—in an exquisite work of storytelling. The book is a patchwork of stories, identities, and lives that come beautifully together through Alyan’s poetic language.  Its beauty has been haunting us long after we finished reading the memoir. For us, this is a clear winner.

Judges of the Creative Non-Fiction Award were:
Marin Heinritz (Kalamazoo College)
Agata Szczeszak-Brewer (Wabash College)
Angela Zito (Albion College)

For more information on the New Writers Award, please contact Colleen Monahan Smith ([email protected]) or visit:  GLCA New Writers Award.