The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce that the 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize has been awarded to Samuel Piccone by series editor Patricia Smith. The poet will receive a $5,000 cash prize, and his manuscript Domestica will be published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series in the spring of 2026. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
Domestica, Piccone’s debut collection, resides squarely at the intersection of inheritance and the escaping of it. Across these poems, the routines of marriage and parenthood, illness and faith, are explored through lenses of smallness, plumbed for their quietest reasonings. In doing so, this collection aims to make better sense of the collage and echo that defines so much of day-to-day life. How much of one’s childhood is capable of being carried? How much needs to be put down and walked away from before someone new picks it up? These poems insist: keep looking, be startled into paying attention to the world again.
“I feel so blessed and honored to be the winner of the 2026 Miller Williams Prize,” said Piccone, “as well as to be a part of a series I’ve long admired. To have a poet as esteemed as Patricia Smith not only read and spend time with my manuscript, but then to call me on the phone and tell me she liked it—talk about surreal. Truly one of the great thrills of my life. It means so much to know my voice was seen and felt by the amazing editorial staff at University of Arkansas Press. I’ll never be able to thank them enough for their care, attention, and effort toward bringing Domestica into the world.”
A lecturer at Iowa State University and poetry editor at Raleigh Review, Piccone’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Sycamore Review, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, and RHINO. He is the author of the chapbook Pupa.
Three finalists were also chosen for the 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, all of which will be published alongside the winner: Paper Pistol by Raphael Jenkins; Rogue Astronaut by Mitchell Jacobs; and The Weather Inside by Stevie Edwards.
Paper Pistol, the debut collection from Raphael Jenkins, follows in the footsteps of poets like Hanif Abdurraqib, John Murillo and Robert Hayden, and examines fatherhood, tenderness, degrees of love, heteronormativity, friendship, grief, and the various violences implemented by and against Black men. Utilizing the voices of various speakers, this collection questions “the totems we bequeath” to our young as we attempt to ready them for a society that has decided it no longer has any use for them, and where those totems come from in the first place. With humor and vivid imagery, Paper Pistol is a collection of poems endeavoring to act as both a mirror showing us what is, and a window offering a small view of what could be if we are willing to see it through.
Jenkins was a 2022 Periplus Collective Fellow and is a sous chef for Omni hotels and resorts.
At the core of Rogue Astronaut, the debut poetry collection from Mitchell Jacobs, is a father’s abduction by aliens as a teenager. Knowledge of this event spurs speculations about the extraterrestrial as well as the terrestrial question of familial bonds. A brother living with delusions turns, too, toward the sky. All the while, outer space becomes a realm for the poet to conceptualize queer relationships and the limits of cognition. Just as Agent Mulder’s UFO poster in The X-Files claims “I WANT TO BELIEVE,” so Jacobs wants to believe in other life, even in the divine.
Jacobs is a poet and translator from Minnesota. His poems have appeared in journals such as the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review. He is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where he serves as managing editor of Ricochet Editions.
The poems in The Weather Inside center around trying to build an enduring love and healthy relationship while living with the mind’s frightful weather (a.k.a. bipolar disorder, CPTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and alcoholism); finding self-acceptance and stillness within the solitude of the pandemic; and reevaluating views on parenthood and marriage as a feminist approaching middle age.
Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and poetry editor of The South Carolina Review. She is the author of Quiet Armor, Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief.
Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Unshuttered (2023), Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press.