Jennifer Chang and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva Win the 2026 Tufts Poetry Awards | Claremont Graduate University

Jennifer Chang and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva Win the 2026 Tufts Poetry Awards | Claremont Graduate University
April 7, 2026
Jennifer Chang and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva Win the 2026 Tufts Poetry Awards
There is no neutral version of the American story. There is only the version that gets told, and everything it leaves out.
Jennifer Chang’s
An Authentic Life,
winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award,
and
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva’s
Cowboy Park
, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, offer their audiences fresh insights into those conversations, and perhaps a moment of respite within them.
Now in its 34th year, the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards have made a consistent case that poetry matters, and that poets deserve to be sustained. Hosted by CGU’s School of Arts & Humanities, the awards stand among the most significant honors in contemporary American poetry. The Kingsley Tufts carries a $100,000 prize for a mid-career poet — designed not as a coronation but, as former recipient Tom Sleigh once put it, as “a steppingstone and not a tombstone.” The Kate Tufts Discovery Award, at $10,000, honors a first book of genuine promise.
“CGU is honored to be the steward of Kate Tufts’s remarkable gift,” says Lori Anne Ferrell, director of the awards and dean of the School of Arts & Humanities. “Kate’s intention to recognize both debuts of ‘true promise’ and ‘excellence at mid-career’ has ensured the future of poetry in America.”
Jennifer Chang —
An Authentic Life
Chang is an accomplished author who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker
The American Poetry Review
, and
The Yale Review
, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, among others.
An Authentic Life
, published by Copper Canyon Press, has also been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Chang received the news of her selection during the annual “Call the Winner’s Dinner” — a uniquely Tufts tradition where the judges dine and discuss the finalists before calling them over the phone.
“I have been a longtime admirer of the poets on the committee that chose my book, and to be read by them with such care is an honor in itself. Truly, they are dream readers for me,” Chang said. “To receive the award is profoundly validating and humbling. Validating in that it affirms my instincts, terrifying as they were, and in that I feel permitted to continue writing and growing.”
An Authentic Life
is Chang’s third collection, and in many ways her most ambitious. When asked what inspired it, she admitted that the writing process was disorienting from the start. “I often didn’t feel like I was writing poems and yet I couldn’t stop the impulse to reach into the historical and personal pasts and make, somehow, a dialogue with those pasts, and so I was often bewildered and terrified.”
That impulse began in Washington, D.C., in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. “I wrote the first poems of this book after the first election of Donald Trump, when I was living in Washington, D.C. It set in motion an inquiry into philosophy, the roots of democracy, and into what one poem title refers to as ‘my own private patriarchy.’ I returned to the Plato I had read in college and that further led me to thinking about my father and the various father figures in my life that supplied my education with notions of reason and value that I began to see as faulty.”
The book grew outward from there beyond the personal and into the political. “Many things have changed since I wrote my first book, which was published in 2008. I became a mother; the political climate of our country (and across the world) has changed drastically and in devastating ways. I moved from Ohio to Washington, DC to Texas. Each of these changes has required me to complicate the lyric poem’s historical tendency toward interiority and private life in order to engage with public life. I’m increasingly concerned with our collective responsibilities and with the ways that history inflects the personal and, especially, the domestic. My aesthetic commitment continues to be with the lyric poem, and yet, I find myself now more than ever pushing against the constraints of the solitary speaker, the ‘I.'”
Writing the book also brought an unexpected gift. As a student, Chang had wanted to study Classics or Philosophy, but she ended up an English major, in part, she jokes, because “Classics courses were often very early and Philosophy courses too hard.” Returning to those same texts decades later as an accomplished poet, the obstacle turned out not to be the ideas. It was the form. “Writing
An Authentic Life
was scary because I was trying to re-engage with ideas and texts that had stumped me as a much younger person. I think I was surprised that I understood more than I realized and also, thank goodness, I am first and foremost a poet.”
That confidence carries into her teaching as well. “I find great joy in teaching and there really is little I love more than close reading a poem with a group of students, just one poem for an entire class period. It’s a process of discovery, a gathering of knowledges, perspectives, and emotions that brings all of us closer to insight.” For Chang, the poem’s capacity to connect across cultures and time isn’t incidental to its value. It’s the point.
What she hopes readers carry away is as spare and hard-won as the book itself: “I hope the reader feels less alone in their fear and uncertainty.”
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva —
Cowboy Park
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas to Mexican immigrants and earned his MFA from Columbia University. His work has appeared in
The Boston Review
The Hopkins Review
, and
Best New Poets
, and he has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Lambda Literary.
Reflecting on winning the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Martínez-Leyva says he is “still processing the recognition that Cowboy Park has received.”  To say I am surprised is an understatement. I never imagined this would happen, especially given the long, winding path it took to get here.”
Cowboy Park
, his debut collection, was partially born out of loss. Three years after graduating from Columbia, Martínez-Leyva lost his mentor, poet Lucie Brock-Broido. “Her absence deeply affected me. I felt disconnected from my writing, my work, and the literary world,” he says. “As a result, I stopped writing altogether. Years passed, and that hope kept dwindling … But despite feeling discouraged, something kept propelling me back to writing.”
Then the poems started insisting again.
The collection takes its title from a neighborhood park near Martínez-Leyva’s childhood home in El Paso, a city he describes as full of doublings, where the mythology of the American West and the lived reality of the U.S.-Mexico border exist in the same dust. It is an autobiographical excavation of queerness, identity, and the immigrant experience, framed through the loaded image of the cowboy.
“The very word ‘buckaroo’ comes from vaquero,” Martínez-Leyva notes, “which makes clear that so much of what we think of as the American cowboy was shaped by the vaquero tradition.” The stories of Black and Brown cowboys, the vaqueros whose labor and culture built the myth, were replaced by the fable of the wild West and the Hollywood cowboy.
Cowboy Park
puts them back.
The book also carries more personal weight. While writing it, Martínez-Leyva lived through his mother surviving the 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso and struggled for years with whether it was his story to tell. “It took about two years and a period of silence to sit with my thoughts, acknowledge them, and write,” he says. What helped him move forward was understanding what the book was actually about: survival — “how to live through and with grief, tragedy, homophobia, and racism,” he says.
For Martínez-Leyva, who had spent years wondering whether he still had it in him, the recognition lands differently than most. “They offer hope,” he says of the awards, “which is something I felt I had lost.”
Jennifer Chang and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva will be celebrated at the
2026 Tufts Poetry Awards Reading and Reception
on April 15 at Lyman Hall, Pomona College, in Claremont, California. The event is free and open to the public.
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