Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize winners published in Poem-a-Day, four poets selected - asking for a friend

[NatureBoy86]

Academy of American Poets announced the 2026 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize winners on Earth Day, April 22nd. Malia Maxwell, W. J. Herbert, Ronald Carson and Deahna Fumarol all picked up the prize, with Herbert's piece Drought Season running in Poem-a-Day on May 3rd. The prize has been running since 2019 and reaches more than 330,000 readers daily through email, podcast and social.

Maxwell is Kanaka Maoli and writes from Seattle, has an MFA from Helen Zell, won the Gutterman Award in 2025. Herbert's Dear Specimen from Beacon Press was a 2020 National Poetry Series pick. The class of winners feels coherent in a way climate poetry prizes have not always been.

Climate poetry as a category is one of those things that is either going to age into being the central project of contemporary poetry or get dismissed as didactic. The work that is genuinely doing the thing rather than just announcing it is the work I want to read more of

The Academy of American Poets Announces the Winners of the 2026 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prizepoets.org

[Nina81]

Climate poetry is hard to do without sliding into manifesto, the four winners have all avoided that as far as I can tell

[Zero-Point]

Maxwell's work is fantastic, very glad to see Kanaka Maoli poets getting this kind of platform

[StoneCold]

And yet how many of those 330k subscribers can name three current poets

[Daresh84]

Dear Specimen is one of the underrated collections of the last five years, Herbert deserves all of this

[TheGreatMoney]

Honestly I am worn out on climate poetry as a category, it has gotten formulaic fast

[WaveFunction]

Disagree, the category is doing the work poetry historically did during wars and political crises, that is not a formula problem that is a subject matter problem

[Estuary59]

Poem-a-Day reaching 330k readers a day is the actual story here, that is more reach than most journals will get in a decade

[AnthonyCribb]

Probably more than you think honestly, the audience is larger than the in field would credit

[PhilippeMercadal]

Drought Season is genuinely good, read it on May 3rd and it has stuck with me

[Jess30]

Treehouse Investments funding this is one of the better corporate poetry sponsorships, no creepy strings