Announcing the Finalists for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Poetry!

We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Poetry. The winner will be announced at the 2024 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony, which will be aired virtually (date and time to be announced).

Without further ado, here are the finalists for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Poetry:

Rosa Alcalá’s You (Coffee House Press)

Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives (Tin House)

Rae Armantrout’s Go Figure (Wesleyan University Press)

Makalani Bandele’s (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk (Futurepoem)

Daniel Borzutzky’s The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press)

Armen Davoudian’s The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House)

Raymond de Borja’s facture (Broken Sleep Books)

Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s Object 7 (Futurepoem)

Paolo Javier’s Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) (Poets of Queens)

Karen An-Hwei Lee’s The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo Press)

Miriam Levine’s Forget About Sleep (NYQ Books)

Kyle Liang’s Good Son (Sundress Publications)

Dawn Lundy Martin’s Instructions for the Lovers (Nightboat Books)

Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Kinds of Grace (FlowerSong Press)

Shani Mootoo’s Oh Witness Dey! (Book*Hug Press)

Michelle Murphy’s Disheveled Histories (Wet Cement Press)

Tanya Olson’s Born Backwards (YesYes Books)

Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist (Graywolf Press), translated by Farid Matuk

Katie Prince’s Tell This to the Universe (YesYes Books)

Kathryn Rantala’s My Archipelago (Sandy Books)

Sara Daniele Rivera’s The Blue Mimes (Graywolf Press)

Eric Sirota’s The Rent Eats First (Button Poetry)

Danez Smith’s Bluff (Graywolf Press)

Natalie Louise Tombasco’s Milk for Gall (Southern Indiana Review Press)

Tony Koji Wallin-Sato’s Okaerinasai (Wet Cement Press)

(Image: Yves Tanguy’s Le Temps Égaux (Time Without Change) (1951))

John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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