Jane Huffman, an instructor at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, has received the 2026 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize for her new poetry collection, Dilemma. Awarded to the sole author of a full-length poetry collection, the prize includes the publication of the winning manuscript by Vanderbilt University Press, a $10,000 award, an invitation to read in the Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series, and a one-week residency on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville.
“It is an incredible honor to publish Jane Huffman’s Dilemma. The judges were rightfully dazzled by the metalinguistic registers at play, the layers of meaning in small snippets of daily life,” said Gianna Mosser, director of Vanderbilt University Press. “Her citations and influences coalesce somewhere new, even as the poems recognize their formal origins and inspirations.”
In addition to her latest collection, Huffman is the author of Public Abstract (American Poetry Review, 2023), which received the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Huffman’s poems have appeared in several prominent magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, and Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2019, Huffman received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She currently teaches courses online as well as in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency master of fine arts program.
Huffman received her master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in English and literary arts at the University of Denver, where she is the managing editor of Denver Quarterly.
Dilemma is scheduled for publication in March 2027.