FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact: Michelle Malonzo
September 23, 2026
Winners are Sa Whitley of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, Joel Worford of the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, and Liesel Hamilton for the Sarabande Prize in the Essay
LOUISVILLE, KY: On September 23, Sarabande Books announced the winners of their 2026 Annual Prizes which includes the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, selected by Adrian Matejka, the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Kaveh Akbar, and the Sarabande Prize in the Essay, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Prize winners receive $2,000, publication of the work, a standard royalty contract, and an introduction written by the guest judge.
“Each winner of the 2026 Sarabande Annual Prizes is a treasure. They reckon with their complex subjects with nuance, wit, inventiveness, and evident joy,” stated Sarabande’s Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief Kristen Renee Miller.
Sarabande Prize in the Essay, judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Liesel Hamilton won the Sarabande Prize in the Essay for her manuscript dovetailing to be published by Sarabande Books June 13, 2028. Nezhukumatathil said, “This beautiful essay collection honors the fragile but sustaining ties between family and landscape. In these pages, birds serve as boon companions, guides, and witnesses. By the final page, you'll find yourself looking more carefully at birds—and most importantly–at the people you love.”
Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Kaveh Akbar
Joel Worford won the Mary McCarthy Prize for his manuscript of short stories The Trouble with Knowing Better, to be published by Sarabande Books October 26, 2027. Akbar said, “The Trouble with Knowing Better’s treatment of myth and what, who, gets mythologized, is so singular and moving, it's hard to know exactly what to say about it. The author takes on love, music, God, family, sports, power in voices that carousel between the demonic and sacred, the hilarious profane and the shudderingly brilliant, often all in the same paragraph. It's thrilling! It's so much the real thing.”
Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, judged by Adrian Matejka
Sa Whitley won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry for their collection I'm Not Supposed to Imagine You in the Future, to be published by Sarabande Books April 4, 2028. Matejka describes it as, “The daring, wide-ranging poems in Sa Whitley’s I’m Not Supposed to Imagine You in the Future are teeming with family, whether it’s the family of biology, the family of topographies, the family of harmony between words, or the future families we build for ourselves. There’s a closeness in these poems that invites us into their singularity, whether they are love poems, like the title poem where a lover “corral(s) the present-tense with the electric flow of black & living,” or poems that interrogate the folklore of Blackness in the United States. Whitley's poems center the emotional wisdom and the heat of experience, even in this fracturing America.
I haven't read a collection with the depth, range, and clarity of I’m Not Supposed to Imagine You in the Future in a very long time."
About the Prize Winners
Liesel Hamilton is the author of Beyond the Turn Around, a collection of lyric nature essays (University Press of Florida, 2027), and the co-author of Wild South Carolina (Hub City Press, 2016). She has been published in Audubon, Bellevue Literary Review, Catapult, and The Normal School, among other publications. Her MFA is from George Mason University, her PhD is from Florida State University, and she currently works as an Assistant Instructional Professor for the University of Florida.
Sa Whitley is a black queer poet and scholar from Silver Spring, Maryland. Based in Phoenix, they are an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Whitley is also the Co-Director of the Queer X Humanities Initiative at the ASU Humanities Institute. Whitley’s poems have been published in POETRY Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, Palette Poetry, and Scalawag, among others. Recent honors include a 2025 summer residency with the McCormack Writing Center, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a Poetry & the Senses Fellowship—a collaboration between ASU and UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. In 2024, they won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize. In their spare time, Whitley goes to queer dance parties, plays with their cats, and watches sci-fi shows that imagine liberatory and postcolonial futures.
Joel Worford is a writer and musician from Richmond, Virginia. His work appears/is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast Journal, Best Small Fictions, and more. Joel received scholarships to attend the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently resides in Iowa City. The Trouble with Knowing Better is his first book.
About Sarabande Books Annual Prizes
The Sarabande Annual Prizes were established to support the work of new and emerging artists across genres, experiences, and borders. Our flagship awards, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, have been running continuously for 31 years. Past judges include Ocean Vuong, Alexander Chee, Victoria Chang, Ross Gay, and Hanif Abdurraqib, to name a few. The Annual Prize has published the early works of Emily Fridlund, Maya Popa, and Rick Barot to name a few.
About Sarabande Books
Sarabande Books champions innovative, transnational, and divergent literature across genres, experience, language, and borders. Sarabande Books believes direct submission access supports greater inclusivity in publishing and broader representation in the literary canon. Because of this core value, Sarabande provides un-agented writers opportunities year-round to submit work directly through open calls and our annual prizes. The Sarabande catalog of books and chapbooks are smart, offbeat, humorous, innovative, and weird. Sarabande consistently remains ahead of the times. The press remains sensitive to issues, themes, connections, and storytelling styles traditionally undervalued by mainstream publishing.
For more details about Sarabande Books and its program offerings, please visit https://www.sarabandebooks.org/ and follow them on Instagram @sarabandebooks and Bluesky @sarabandebooks.bsky.social.