HWS News
23 October 2026 • Faculty Schonning ’16 Wins $20,000 International Poetry Prize
Daniel Schonning ’16 is the winner of the 2026 Montreal International Poetry Prize, a global competition celebrating contemporary poetry.
Professor of Practice in Creative Writing Daniel Schonning ’16 has been awarded a $20,000 prize for his poem “Tallow.” The award is a continuation of Schonning’s recent success; his debut poetry collection, As When Waking, was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize earlier this summer.
Every two years, the Montreal International Poetry Prize awards one prize of $20,000 to one poet for a single poem. The competition receives thousands of entries from around the world, with the 2026 iteration attracting more than 4,500 entries.
Since its inception in 2011, the prize has been adjudicated by an international slate of jurors and an acclaimed final judge. Schonning’s “Tallow” was selected by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet and professor Natalie Diaz.
In her commendation, Diaz describes “Tallow” as merging the “known and unknown, the wound and the scar, the light and the dark, the sound of breaking and the protection of sleep and peace—all at the same time.”
This summer, Schonning joined a poetry reading hosted by the Seneca Review at Two Goats Brewery in Hector, N.Y., where he shared “Tallow.”
Sixty finalists were selected from around the globe, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Côte D’Ivoire, France, Greece, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, the Philippines and Ukraine.
Prize Director Carmen Faye Mathes says it was, “incredible to see the diversity of poets and poetry represented. There’s something magical too about the ways the poems themselves, in their lyricism, ingenuity, and the stories they tell, map a diversity of spaces and places beyond any single position or point of view.”
Schonning’s poem will be published in the 2026 Montreal Prize Anthology, forthcoming from Véhicule Press.
The complete list of finalists is available on the Montreal International Poetry Prize website.
