Poet Maya Marshall has been selected as the latest recipient of the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University.
The Holmes National Poetry Prize was established in memory of Princeton 1951 alumnus Theodore H. Holmes and is presented each year to a poet of special merit as selected by the faculty of the Program in Creative Writing, which includes writers Michael Dickman, Katie Farris, Aleksandar Hemon, A.M. Homes, Ilya Kaminsky, Yiyun Li, Paul Muldoon, Patricia Smith, Lloyd Suh, and Susan Wheeler. The award, currently carrying a prize of $5,000, was first made to Mark Doty in 2011 and has since also been awarded to Franny Choi, Eduardo Corral, Natalie Diaz, Hannah Sanghee Park, Matt Rasmussen, Solmaz Sharif, Evie Shockley, and Jenny Xie.
Maya Marshall, recipient of the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing. Photo credit: Ashley Kaushinger
Marshall is a poet, essayist, editor, and educator. She is author of the poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love (Haymarket Books, 2022) and the chapbook Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Marshall co-founded underbelly, which she describes as “the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision.”
“Every time we hear the haughty declaration that poetry is dead, dying, or (once again, right on schedule) teetering on its last stanza, we can take heart from a ferocious new cohort of lyricists who school with their forebears, nod respectfully to tradition, then proceed to set upon a blistering trail that smacks the landscape flat and yet again slams shut the mouths of the naysayers,” said poet and Professor of Creative Writing Patricia Smith in announcing the prize. “Leading that charge is Maya Marshall, whose 2022 debut All the Blood Involved in Love is tender, ferocious and musical—all the things that poetry should be if it intends to keep breathing. Maya is also a community stalwart, a scholar and cultural critic, a discerning editor, and a keen and beneficent instructor of the art—arming the next generation with the weapons they’ll need the next time poetry dies, yet again, and again.”
Marshall’s poems and essays have been published or are forthcoming in numerous collections and publications including Prose for the People (Penguin Random House, 2025), American Poetry Review, the Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, Poets.Org, Split This Rock, and Best New Poets. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, Sewanee’s Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and Emory University, among others. Marshall earned her B.A. from Loyola University Chicago and her MFA from the University of South Carolina.
An editor-at-large for Haymarket Books, Marshall is also a program consultant for the Writing Freedom Fellowship, a literary fellowship for system-impacted writers. As an educator, Marshall has taught at Northwestern University and Emory University, and she is currently an assistant professor of English at Adelphi University.
“Winning the Holmes Poetry Prize came as a major and welcome surprise,” said Marshall. “This vote of confidence from some of the best writers in our nation has heartened and encouraged me. I feel so grateful and honored that writers I respect count my work as part of a shared conversation, enough that they have chosen to direct attention to it—enough that they have also offered me the gift of funding that will buy me a bit of time.”
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts.
