Announcing Nightboat’s 2025 Poetry Prize Winners!

We received over 1000 manuscripts to our Poetry Prize this year, submissions which encompassed a full range of aesthetic approaches, structures, and themes. We need no further proof that literature today is thriving, dynamic, socially engaged, and politically aware. It was thrilling to discover new voices.

Nightboat Books has chosen two manuscripts as winners of this year’s Nightboat Poetry Prize. These titles will be published in 2028.

The winners of the 2025 Nightboat Poetry Prize are:

Painstar, Starline by Michelle Alexander

Queen of the Little Stinkers by Izzy Casey

Congratulations to our winners! Read more about each of the prize-winning manuscripts, and find a list of our finalists below.

Painstar, Starline by Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander’s Painstar, Starline sings with many mouths, and all of its mouths are ablaze with stars, stars teeming with soil. Rooted in Black feminist citational practice, the collection syncretizes literary inheritances, oral histories of elders, mythos, Cab Calloway, and Yo-Yo Ma, theoretical influences like Christina Sharpe and Walter Benjamin, and more into a stunning lyric asterism that cuts across the borders of formally recognized constellations. Stretching elegantly between that Cliftonian “starshine and clay,” Painstar, Starline is generous and searing in its questions: How do we, when scattered like stars, hold a diasporic yearning for touch simultaneously with an unflinching recognition that this world, carved by colonial modernity, makes it all—the yearn, the touch, and any return—so anguished? And how might anguish flare into navigational systems that lead us to touch what we need right here, right now? Or, in Alexander’s own poignant and glowing words, “What is meant to be touched, to be gone-through / by this limit / of the human?” —Destiny Hemphill and Terrance Hudson

Michelle Alexander is an American-Trinidadian poet and interdisciplinary scholar. She is a Cofounder and Founding Director of Interdisciplinary Arts for Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine. A graduate of New York University, where she received the Herbert Rubin Prize in Poetry, she also holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, where she was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. Her debut collection, A Stone’s Throw from C R A Y (New American Press), won the New American Prize, and her second book, Painstar, Starline, received the Nightboat Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Her honors include the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Breakwater Peseroff Prize, and her work has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, and other journals.

Izzy Casey’s Queen of the Little Stinkers is a collection that crackles with ferocious originality, offering poems that navigate family fractures, mental health struggles, and the absurdities of girlhood. This book is a clown car of brilliance, a fun house mirror that reflects familial memory through a gaze both tender and indicting. Threaded with comforting perversion, these poems snap between memory and acid dream, capturing the floating, shiny frame of childhood, but not without its weight. Funny and self-effacing, Casey offers poems that create worlds of vulnerability, with eyes closed and both fists swinging. As Casey writes, “I will beat you to a pulp / And make fine tasting juice.” Casey’s “Little Stinker” becomes co-conspirator, playmate, and comrade. We’re excited for you to invite her over for a playdate. —Naima Yael Tokunow

Izzy Casey’s poems have been published in The Baffler, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, Gulf Coast: A Journal for Literature and Fine Arts, and more. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts. She lives in New York City.