Winners of the 2018 Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

Safia Elhillo, Hieu Minh Nguyen, sam sax, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Paul Tran have been announced as winners of the 2018 Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

Administered by the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine, the fellowship comes with the prize amount of $25,800 for each poet. According to the foundation, the “prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry and is open to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age.”

Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, said that “Each of these fellows energetically speaks to and contributes to the ever-increasing interest in contemporary poetry, especially among young people.”

Speaking about her win, Safia said: “I am most excited, I think, by being in fellowship with this cohort of poets, all of whose writing and literary citizenship continue to teach me about bravery, about craft, about generosity.” Author of The January Children, Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, and has an MFA in poetry from the New School. She was the winner of the Brunel Poetry Prize for Africans in 2015, and winner of the Sillerman Prize in 2016 for a first book. Safia is a Cave Canem fellow and is currently the poetry editor of Kinfolks Quarterly.

A poetry editor at Muzzle magazine, Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet based in Minneapolis. He is the author the poetry books, Not Here and This Way to the Sugar. Nguyen is currently an MFA student at Warren Wilson College.

Author of bury it and madness, Sam Sax received an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas, Austin, and has won fellowships and honors including: the Gulf Coat Prize, the Iowa Review Award, the American Literary Award, the James Laughlin Award. His poems have been published in Tin House, Buzzfeed, Poetry, the New York Times, among other journals. He serves as poetry editor of BOAAT Press.

Paul Tran earned an MFA in poetry from Washington University. Their work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. They are poetry editor at The Offing.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico earned her MFA in poetry from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Lima :: Limón and The Verging Cities. She has taught in several universities, and is the recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Great Lakes Colleges Association Prize, the Utah Book Award.

Among previous winners of the Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship are: Emily Jungmin Yoon, Jamila Woods, Ocean Vuong, Wendy Xu, Kaveh Akbar, Angel Nafis, Richie Hofmann, Phillip B. Williams.