Booking and details
Get TicketsDates Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, created in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht, is awarded annually for a poetry collection by a writer who has published no more than one book of poetry.
This February, we celebrate the 20th winner, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, for her manuscript Might Could, as selected by judge Shane McCrae (Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, In the Language of My Captor), who will also read.
The reading will be followed by a book signing in the Great Hall.
Can’t join us in person? Purchase virtual access to a live streaming of the reading.
Two poems from Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s Might Could
followed by a note on the author
Petunia
Not that I ever liked you
before, but each spring
till now you’ve kept yourself
in the world, died back
to the plain ground
and come again, answering
no invitation of ours but saying
a trumpet’s yes to the part sun
by the front porch where once
presumably a hanging basket
waved above the brick,
above the sandy soil, long after
the first of you were taken
from their own places
but before they were made to live one
season only—or you escaped
that too, persisting, seeds
in the sand, seeds
in the antlion dens, returning
to make each summer
furred leaves and unabashed
purple flowers, deep and cool,
no hint of subtlety,
scent light and almost
irritatingly gentle
but there, inescapable,
making a one-plant world beside
the porch edge, and I like you
now, I know you now,
and now, six years here and well
into June, nothing
of you, no leaf, no sign.
© Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Against Stoicism
An itch, untouched,
will twitch and wail
till an answering scratch
unhitches hell.
A tempered squeal
can conjure oil.
Squeak, wheel.
You may as well.
© Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Poems courtesy of The Waywiser Press. Author’s note: Petunia
first appeared in The Georgia Review, and Against Stoicism
first appeared in The Sewanee Review.
About the poets
Anna Lena Phillips Bell
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.
Shane McCrae
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.