The Sewanee Review is pleased to announce that Caki Wilkinson is the recipient of the 2026 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

University Vice Chancellor Dr. Robert Pearigen and Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross will present Wilkinson with the award this October at the University of the South in Sewanee. As part of this year’s celebration, the writers Alice Bolin and Daniel Hornsby will lecture on Wilkinson’s poetry.

Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collections “Circles Where the Head Should Be,” “The Wynona Stone Poems,” and “The Survival Expo.” A graduate of Rhodes College, she earned an MFA at Johns Hopkins University and a PhD at the University of Cincinnati. Recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Kenyon Review. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Alice Bolin is the author of the essay collections “Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession” and “Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse.” Daniel Hornsby is the author of the novels “Sucker” and “Via Negativa.” Both Bolin and Hornsby also teach in the Sewanee School of Letters.

We hope you will join us this Oct. 20 and 21 to celebrate Wilkinson and her exceptional body of work.