The Jake Adam York Prize

The Jake Adam York Prize for a first or second poetry collection is a collaboration between Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions.

Book-length manuscripts can be Submitted via Submittable from July 1 through October 15. (See the Guidelines. See information about the 2023-24 winner.)

The prize-winning poet receives $2,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions.

Initial screening for the prize will be facilitated by the poetry editors of Copper Nickel. (All screeners for the prize will have published at least one book of poetry.) The winner is announced in early March.

Our goal in instituting the Jake Adam York Prize is to honor Jake’s name and legacy with a top-tier, ethical book prize that will offer not just publication but also high-quality design, marketing, and strong national distribution­. Milkweed Editions—which has an excellent marketing team and national distribution through Publishers Group West (PGW)—can offer these things. We at Copper Nickel are grateful and excited for their partnership.

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GUIDELINES for 2026–27

For the 2026–27 prize we will begin accepting online submissions of book-length (i.e., more than 48 pages) poetry manuscripts on July 1, 2026. The final due date for submission will be October 15, 2026. The prize winner will be announced in early March, 2027.

Our judge for 2026–27 will be announced in the spring.

To be eligible for the prize, poets cannot have published—or have under contract—more than one full-length book of poetry in English. (Chapbooks of less than 48 pages and individual poems in magazines are OK.)

Self-published books count as previous book publications if they are at least 48 pages and saw any real distribution whatsoever. (I.e., if your self-published book has an ISBN, and/or has been distributed through Amazon, and/or has had a web presence—even a very limited one—that counts as a previously published book.)

Separate books published in English abroad also count toward eligibility, but not books reprinted abroad or published in another language. (I.e., if you published one book in the US and a different book in the UK, you would be ineligible to submit, but if you published a book in the US and that book was reprinted in the UK, you would still be eligible. If you published one book in the US in English and another book in, say, Poland in Polish you would still be eligible to submit to our prize as long as the book you were submitting to our prize was a not a translation of the book you published in Poland in Polish.)

Previously self-published books are ineligible for submission for the prize, as are translations and co-authored books.

Poets must be US Citizens (living abroad is fine) or must live in the US and be writing in English.

Poets who are family, current colleagues, close friends, or recent students (within the past five years) of the judge are not eligible to enter. Former student editors and interns of Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are also ineligible.

Entrants to the Jake Adam York Prize are welcome to submit to other book prizes, including the other Milkweed Editions prizes (the Ballard Spahr Prize, the Max Ritvo Prize, and the National Poetry Series). If your manuscript wins another prize, please notify us and withdraw your manuscript from the Jake Adam York Prize.

Manuscripts can—but don’t have to—include work previously published in literary periodicals and/or chapbooks. If your manuscript includes previously published work, please include an acknowledgments page.

Final judging for the prize is anonymous. For this reason, please do not include your name or other identifying marks on the manuscript itself. (We will be able to obtain that information from Submittable, and the information will not be forwarded to the final judge.)

All entrants will receive a one-year subscription to Copper Nickel (worth $20) in exchange for a $25 reading fee, and all money raised beyond production costs for the prize will go toward paying Copper Nickel contributors.

Please note that when you submit your work to the Jake Adam York Prize you’re adding yourself to our contact list and, thus, consenting to receiving perhaps 1–2 emails per year about our book prize, subscriptions drives, etc.

Here’s the link one more time: SUBMIT.

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ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2025–26 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!

Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Patricia Smith has chosen Constant Laval Williams‘ book Elegy with Beautiful Child of the 2025–26 Jake Adam York Prize. Elegy with Beautiful Child will be published by Milkweed Editions in January, 2027, and Williams will receive $2,000.

Constant Laval Williams received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award at the University of Southern California and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He volunteers as a senior reader for Ploughshares, and his poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, Lana Turner, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles.

In choosing Williams’ book, Patricia Smith says: “‘What a joy to have anything at all,’ writes Constant Laval Williams in this raw and utterly sparkling debut, an instruction manual on all the best ways to claw through grit towards whatever shines. What struck me most about Elegy with Beautiful Child is how much we need it. Everywhere we turn waits the lip of an abyss, hundreds of ways to shatter, a numbing news update, a tangling of shadows. Language now lies to us so often, and with such skill. But in these stark, revelatory poems, we’re urged to remember the perseverance of light that’s sometimes muted, but never dims to nothing. Beauty will never abandon us to hurt. Or as the poet says ‘. . . a hornet nest is still a kind of cathedral.’”

There were 982 manuscripts submitted to the prize this year, which our screeners narrowed to 20 finalists and eight semifinalists. It’s our opinion that every one of these manuscripts is outstanding and eminently publishable.

In addition to naming Williams’ manuscript as the winner, Ms. Smith singled out a runner-up manuscript and two honorable mentions.

The runner up was:

Carrie Johnson, What Survives Is the Work

The honorable mentions were:

Jackie Sabbagh, Love and Transphobia
A. Nicole Sessions, Nine Drops of Turpentine

The other finalists were:

Joshua Boettiger, Six Gestures
Sophia Chong, An Alias of I
Paul Christiansen, River Octopus
Katie Condon, I <3 Dick
Thomas Dooley, not ghost but man
Morgan English, The Field the World
Gabriel Fine, Cartography of Blue
Stephanie Glazier, Of Fish & Country
Siew Hii, Florida Is a Place on Earth
Sarah Maria Medina, To Witness Is to Carry
Lenna Mendoza, As Lightning
Stacy Boe Miller, I Sharpen My Teeth
Jarrett Moseley, Rehumanization Litany
Sam Ross, All Hours
Addie Tsai, Foreign Familiar
Alice White, Between a Dog and a Wolf

And the semi-finalists were:

Imani Christopher, Altar Girl
Sara Femenella, Obedient Daughter
Leah Naomi Green, This Time
Michael Martin, Magnet
Caroline New, The She-Hound Sings
Ugochokwu Okpara, Excarnation
Troy Osaki, Block 13-1-E
Em Setzer, Show Pony
Max Seifert, Men’s Room
Brock Storey, No Night So Dark

And since screeners do essential—if too often unsung—evaluative work narrowing the field of entrants, we think it’s important to note each year who our screeners are (both to say thank you and in the interest of transparency). This year’s screeners were:

Brian Barker, author of Vanishing Acts
Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes
Steven Espada Dawson, author of Late to the Search Party
Ángel García, author of Indifferent Cities
Carolina Hotchandani, author of The Book Eaters
K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
Brionne Janae, author of Because You Were Mine
Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Worldly Things
Jennifer Loyd, author of Ghost in the Archive
Matthew Tuckner, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Finally, we want to mention something briefly about our process: Since a number of entrants had previously published in Copper Nickel, and since other entrants knew one or more of our screeners on a personal level, we were sure to pass the manuscripts among the screeners until no one was tasked with screening work by anyone she had published or with whom she had a personal relationship. We believe strongly in running an ethical contest, and we work hard to ensure that we continue to do so.