Northeastern poet and scholar Juliana Spahr awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her 2025 collection
A poet and scholar of contemporary American literature, Spahr won the prize for poetry for her recent collection “Ars Poeticas.”
Northeastern University English professor Juliana Spahr won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her recent collection, “Ars Poeticas,” a politically charged meditation on poetry’s role in what she describes as “dark times.”
“Ars Poeticas,” which literally means “art of poetry,” weaves together notes on ecological crises, the rise of authoritarian populism and the possibilities of collective care and resistance. In the book, Spahr, who is also a scholar of contemporary American literature, tracks developments across the nuclear age — from the famous Castle Bravo test on through the ages — to today’s moment of crisis, species extinction and political upheaval.
The book gets its title from the Roman poet Horace’s foundational treatise on the art of poetry, which has inspired a tradition across cultures and languages of poets writing their own “ars poeticas,” or meditations on the art of poetry.
In an interview with Northeastern Global News last year, Spahr described “Ars Poeticas” as moving deeper into those sometimes thorny questions about poetry’s “social” role, broader utility and even complicity in larger systems. In one poem, titled “Will There be Singing,” she writes:
“I thought for a while there were two sorts of poets. / Poets who write the terrible nation into existence / and poets screwing around doing something else.”
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As part of that larger explication, she turned to German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who wrote many of his major works in exile during World War II.
“I feel like the question of the book is: What does poetry do in these moments?” said Spahr, who works on Northeastern’s Oakland campus. “What role does it have in this moment of ecological crisis? And I think there’s a slightly more complicated answer to this question — to the question of ecological crisis — than the answer to the alt-right.”
The Pulitzer Prize committee wrote that “Ars Poeticas” “takes stock of her personal disillusionment, which she uses to interrogate her relationship to her art form, community and politics.” The committee this year consisted of poets Tracey K. Smith, D.A. Powell, Camille Dungy, J. Michael Martinez and Elizabeth Willis. “Ars Poeticas” was published in 2025 by Wesleyan Poetry Series.
Spahr declined to comment for this story.
A Frederick A. Rice Professor on the Oakland campus of Northeastern University, has had a distinguished career as a writer and educator, having written extensively about literary developments over the last 50 years, while writing poetry that often blends prose sense, repetition and political or news content to generate her own lyrics and wandering narratives.
Spahr, alongside colleague Stephanie Young, an associate teaching professor of English at Northeastern University Oakland, is also engaged in numerous data-driven projects, including charting demographic trends and changes in the once predominantly white world of literary publishing. The pair authored a series of essays detailing, among other things, the inner workings of the literary prize “economy.”
What they found was that literary awards were more often than not doled out to writers connected to elite institutions, networks and publishers, creating a system where recognition disproportionately skews toward writers of privilege — and a literary culture that has grown exclusionary over time.
Young said that, in her poetry and scholarship, Spahr “relentlessly interrogates the historical conditions under which literature circulates and comes to matter.”
“As Juliana’s friend, colleague and collaborator, I have had the chance to witness firsthand her extraordinary generosity in and out of the classroom, and to work together on projects examining literary prizes and their broader cultural impact,” Young said.
“She embodies a deep commitment to the ethical and political dimensions of literature, and her small press work has brought forward writing that continues to shape what it can do and why it matters,” she added.
Spahr has always been interested in the way poetry and politics intersect, but in a particular way: “More than thinking about poetry as something that goes out and influences people politically, I almost think of it more as politics is constantly shaping literary practices,” she said in a prior interview.
Spahr’s prior collections include That Winter the Wolf Came (2015), Well Then There Now (2011), The Transformation (2007), This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005), Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (2003), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (2001), Response (1996), Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism (1998) and Nuclear (1994). She’s also written several books of criticism.
In addition to Spahr, former Mills College faculty member, Yiyun Li, took home a Pulitzer for memoir.
