The Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation are pleased to announce that Daniel Schonning is the winner of the 2026 Four Quartets Prize for his collection As When Waking (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Selected by judges​ Paisley Rekdal,​ Charif Shanahan, and Brian Teare.

The judges also selected Juliana Spahr for “scotch broom” from Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press, 2025) and Annie Wenstrup for The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, 2025) as finalists for the prize.

Schonning will receive $20,000, and each finalist will receive $1,000.

The Four Quartets Prize—which was launched in 2018, on the 75th anniversary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in a single volume in America, in 1943—is a celebration of the multipart poem, and is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book in 2025.

From the judges’ citation, Four Quartets Prize winner:

‘Daniel Schonning’s book takes the conceit of sequence literally and deploys it with the apparent ease of a virtuoso. To wit: the alphabet is a sequence, and the abecedarian a formal constraint, a twenty-six line poem that enjoins the poet to begin each line with a, b, c, etc., in order until the alphabet’s been spelled out.

Schonning’s skill transforms the abecedarian catalog into an ever-expanding enumeration of the world’s mysteries, leaving readers with the miraculous feeling that our hurt world has been restored by a lover of the real and of the good.’

The full citation on the Four Quartets Prize winner and biographies of the finalists can be found on the Poetry Society of America’s website here.