The 2027 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize Reading
with prize winner Christopher Childers and prize judge A.E. Stallings
Booking and details
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Dates Tue, Feb 16, 2027 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 year’s prize will be given to Christopher Childers for his manuscript Bitters, to be published by Waywiser Books.
Acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator A.E. Stallings (National Book Critics Circle Award nominated Olives, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Like), selected this year’s winner and will read at the event.
This reading introduces a newer yet already celebrated poet to a larger audience. Recent winners include Anna Lena Phillips Bell (Might Could), Julia Thacker (To Wildness), Hannah Louise Poston (Julia Hungry), and James D’Agostino (The Goldfinch Caution Tapes).
Can’t join us in person? Purchase virtual access to a live streaming of the reading.
About the prize judge
A.E. Stallings
A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.
About Waywiser Books
In the summer of 1997, after a week spent interviewing the poet W.D. Snodgrass at his home in upstate New York, Philip Hoy realized he had far too much good material for a magazine article. The result was W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy, the first in a series of book-length interviews with eminent older poets. Over the next few years, the micro-press known as Between The Lines (BTL) would publish expansive dialogues with John Ashbery, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, and many others, to considerable acclaim. Hecht described his written exchange with Hoy as the closest thing to an autobiography he would ever produce.
Buoyed by the success of Between The Lines, Hoy launched the Waywiser Press in 2001, a literary press with a special focus on American poets that he felt were undervalued in England. In the years that followed, Waywiser brought out UK editions of new collections by Richard Wilbur, B.H. Fairchild, and Mark Strand, and debut books by Deborah Warren, Clive Watkins, and Joseph Harrison, among many others. Read more