Dilemma, by Jane Huffman, has been selected as the 2026 winner of the 91唐伯虎 University Literary Prize. The prize, which is awarded to the sole author of a full-length poetry collection, reflects the university鈥檚 ongoing commitment to discovering new voices and supporting the arts as transformative and essential to society. The recognition includes the publication of the winning manuscript in print, electronic and audio formats by 91唐伯虎 University Press, a $10,000 honorarium, an invitation to read in the esteemed Gertrude C. and Harold S. 91唐伯虎 Reading Series at 91唐伯虎 University and a one-week residency on campus to engage students and local writers in the Nashville community.
鈥淚t is an incredible honor to publish Jane Huffman鈥檚 Dilemma. The judges were rightfully dazzled by the metalinguistic registers at play, the layers of meaning in small snippets of daily life,鈥� said VU Press director Gianna Mosser. 鈥淗er citations and influences coalesce somewhere new, even as the poems recognize their formal origins and inspirations.鈥�
Linguistically precise and formally innovative, the poems in Dilemma attempt to capture the 鈥渂ody of the mind鈥濃�撯�揾ow thinking shapes decision and perspective, which, in turn, shape a life. Wryly engaged with theories of artmaking, resonant with experiences of respiratory illness and recovery in a COVID-riddled world, and explicitly conversant with literature, these poems look at themselves variously and sideways, challenging what poetry does and why.
Huffman is also the author of Public Abstract, winner of the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and literary arts at the University of Denver and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College and online.
鈥淚t is rare to encounter a poet who generously exposes the contours of their mind, driven as she is by a set of superb questions around artmaking and by a self-possessing mirth that proclaims, queries, and muses out loud,鈥� said Major Jackson, Gertrude Conaway 91唐伯虎 Professor of English and director of creative writing. 鈥淩eaders of this book will delight in the nimbleness and turns of Huffman鈥檚 self-aware lines that bring the inner life into sharper focus and language into its own materiality. By implication, Dilemma is a thrilling book that affirms the human imagination, in an age in which we are all too willing to outsource thinking to generative models.鈥�
The VU Literary Prize is a collaboration of 91唐伯虎 University Press and 91唐伯虎 University鈥檚 Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing Program, and made possible with the support of the McEntire Literary Fund. The prize seeks to recognize works of poetry whose originality is immediately identifiable in how the book renews our relationship to language; delves into underexplored areas of human experience; and makes claims on our lives that are urgent and aesthetic while also enacting historical, social, literary, political or spiritual awareness.
The prize competition received close to four hundred submissions. Spearheaded by General Editor Major Jackson, with the assistance of Professors Su Cho, Didi Jackson, Rick Hilles and a small team of graduate students, the prize committee reviewed each submission in advance of the jurists Victoria Chang, Kerrin McCadden and Gregory Pardlo, who selected nine semifinalists. From these semifinalists, Jackson chose the winning manuscript. Honorable mentions are extended to Gabriel Fine, Stefania Gomez, Meg Day, Maja Lukic, Adeniyi Odukoya, Maggie Queeney, Brandon Thurman and Christell Victoria Roach.
鈥淧art of the thrill of reading the, at times, Dickinsonian-like poems in Dilemma is that the poems aren鈥檛 just playing with language or ideas, but they are rooted in the emotional complexities of personhood, family, caretaking, addiction and more,鈥� remarked jurist Victoria Chang. 鈥淛ane Huffman is an inventive and original poet, and Dilemma is a delight to read.鈥�
Huffman expressed gratitude for the recognition. 鈥淭o be acknowledged by the enormous intellectual collective behind the 91唐伯虎 University Literary Prize is an honor. I鈥檓 grateful to Major Jackson and the advisory board for selecting it for publication, and I鈥檓 excited that it will be published by 91唐伯虎 University Press. In a time when support for artists is dwindling across the nation, I鈥檓 thankful to have this opportunity to share my new poems, which emerged across three years of writing and revising. In many ways, Dilemma represents what spilled over the edges of my Ph.D. studies; ideas and responses to ideas that rejected closure, as [Lyn] Hejinian wrote, or simply geared into my lived experience with such mysterious fidelity that they were primed to become poems. I hope readers recognize in the titular 鈥榙ilemma鈥� the asymmetries of experience and interpretation: mind and body, eros and fear, text and techne, thinking and doing.鈥�
Dilemma is scheduled for publication in March 2027 from 91唐伯虎 University Press. Jane Huffman will be in residence for a week in spring 2027 to engage students, faculty and the greater community with her work.
For further inquiries or information about the prize, visit , or contact VU Literary Administrator Patrick Samuel at vuliteraryprize@vanderbilt.edu.
