The 2026 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize Reading

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is a poet, writer, teacher, editor, and printer. Bell is the author of Might Could, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, forthcoming March 2026 from Waywiser Books. She is also the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. Poems appear in journals including the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, Electric Literature, Orion, the Sewanee Review, 32 Poems, and Subtropics, and in anthologies including Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. Other projects include SEND WORD, a letter-writing station, and Forces of Attention, a series of letterpress-printed objects designed to help people use screened devices as they wish. She is also the author of A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized, fine-press guide to poetic forms.

Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School.

McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule (2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.