Winner Announced: The LemonLight Prize 2026

Dawn McGuire wins for “Mule.” Four honorable mentions selected from a shortlist of 51.

Leila Chatti has selected the winner of the inaugural LemonLight Prize 2026.

Dawn McGuire, for her poem “Mule.”

Leila’s citation, in full:

“What drew me to this poem is its honest, plain-stated tenderness. I admire a poem that says what it means, that doesn’t try to obscure its truths. This poem sings with the language of medicine alongside that of the everyday — ‘Embarcadero’ and ‘Hair Doc,’ ‘omentum’ and ‘amyloid.’ This poet has a keen eye for detail and knows when to call up an evocative image, and when to simply say what is. ‘When I carried my boy I felt worthy.’ This poem is a tender ode to the body, to the self, when it is not necessarily easy to do so — we need more poems like this.”

Dawn is a poet and neurologist living in Orinda, California — a physician-writer whose work brings the vocabulary of medicine into the lyric register without either apologizing for the technical language or performing it. That the inaugural LemonLight winner writes about the body from inside a medical practice feels right for a prize named after a poem that turns on thresholds — half dawn, half memory, the moment between what was and what might be.

Dawn receives $2,000, featured placement in the anthology, and a long-form interview on our Substck this September.

The four honorable mentions:

• Michael Emmanuel — “Bus Ride” — from Knoxville, Tennessee

• Charles Grosel — “Another Man’s Clothes” — from Phoenix, Arizona

• Caroline Mellor — “A Million Tiny Miracles Every Second” — from East Sussex, United Kingdom

• Carlos Andrés Gómez — “Home Is Not An Address” — from New York

Each honorable mention receives $250, featured placement in the anthology, and a featured interview.

The five selections were made from a shortlist of 51 poets, itself drawn from 706 entries submitted from eight countries. Leila read the shortlisted work blind — she is seeing the names for the first time today, alongside the rest of us. The final cut, from 51 to five, was by her account the hardest reading of the process. Different readers on different days would have built different lists.

To the 46 poets on the shortlist who were not selected today: your poem was read closely, published in an anthology of 250 copies that sold out six weeks before printing, and placed in company Leila and I found remarkable.

To the 100 longlisted, and the 706 who sent work: thank you. There is no version of this year in which the field wasn’t stronger than we had any right to expect.

The anthology mails in September to all recipients. A small number of Sesquipedalian Rain Chant remain, if you have not yet held one of our books — the debut publication that started the press, and the reason many of you first heard of Ink & Ribbon. Sesquipedalian Rain Chant →

The 2027 LemonLight Prize opens for submissions in spring.

With gratitude to Leila, to the poets, and to every reader who trusted us this year.

— G. K. Allum (Founder & Presidenet)

Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The LemonLight Prize is our annual award for a single poem, judged blind by a working poet each year.

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