$60,000
Discover New Art Prize
for Poetry and Prose

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. His first novel, Martyr! (2024), was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, and winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize for Fiction.

Photo Credit: Riel Sturchio

Carl Phillips's latest book of poems is Scattered Snows, to the North (2024). His Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007–2020 won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the LA Times Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Library of Congress. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

Photo Credit: Reston Allen

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times-bestselling author of two illustrated collections of essays, Bite by Bite and World of Wonders. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor for over twenty-five years, she serves as a firefly guide for the Mississippi State Parks. Her newest poetry book is Night Owl (Ecco).

Photo Credit: Dustin Parsons

Lauren Groff is the author of eight books, including the National Book Award finalists Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers — one of the New York Times's Best Books of the 21st Century — was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award, and won the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Photo Credit: Brett Simison

Roxane Gay is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and the author of Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times-bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women, and the New York Times-bestselling Hunger, as well as World of Wakanda for Marvel. Her writing appears in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, McSweeney's, Tin House, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She also writes the newsletter The Audacity.