2026: Ruth Awad

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American disabled poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024) and Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Her work can be found in The Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She has an MGA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.