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Michael Waters Poetry Prize

Michael Waters Poetry Prize

A prize of $6,000 and publication by SIR Press is awarded annually for a collection of poetry written in English. All entries are considered for publication.

Next deadline: February 2, 2026.

Carl Phillips will judge.

Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.

Monica Youn selected Kirsten Kaschock's Docenture: A Tale of Hue as Told by the Estate as winner of the 2025 Prize.

Click here for complete 2025 MWPP results.

Contest mailing address (for inquiries and print entries):
          Southern Indiana Review
          Michael Waters Poetry Prize
          University of Southern Indiana
          8600 University Boulevard
          Evansville, IN  47712

2025 MWPP Winner

Kirsten Kaschock, a Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of six poetry books: Unfathoms, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, The Dottery, Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer, Explain This Corpse, and AutoPortrait (as flotsam), forthcoming from  Tupelo Press. Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel, Sleight. A second novel, An  Impossibility of Crows, winner of the Juniper Prize in fiction, and will be published in 2026 by University of Massachusetts Press.

Previous MWPP Winners

Michael Waters Poetry Prize

The Michael Waters Poetry Prize was established in 2013 to honor Michael’s contributions to Southern Indiana Review and American arts and letters.

Michael Waters has written fourteen books of poetry, most recently Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Caw, The Dean of Discipline, and Celestial Joyride. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies, Contemporary American Poetry, and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, and Rolling Stone. He is the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, and New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, New Jersey.