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Interview / Poetry / Dylan Thomas Prize
After winning the 2026 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for Joy Is My Middle Name, Sasha Debevec-McKenney talks to Litro about imperfection, poetic form, influence, sobriety, girlhood and finding the shape of a book written across ten years.
American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has won the 2026 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
The £20,000 prize, awarded to exceptional literary work by writers aged 39 or under, was announced in Swansea on International Dylan Thomas Day. This year’s judging panel selected Debevec-McKenney’s collection unanimously, praising its humour, intimacy, force and formal energy.
Joy Is My Middle Name moves through girlhood, desire, addiction, sobriety, race, womanhood, consumerism and popular culture. It is a book alive to contradiction: funny and wounded, loud and controlled, formally restless and emotionally direct.
Speaking to Litro shortly after the announcement, Debevec-McKenney reflected on what the prize changed, how the collection found its shape, and why poetry can hold more than one life at once.
“Winning the prize has made me love the imperfections.”
About Sasha Debevec-McKenney
Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the author of Joy Is My Middle Name, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The Yale Review. She was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.
On winning the Dylan Thomas Prize
Eric Akoto, Litro
What did winning the Dylan Thomas Prize change for how you see the collection now?
It’s only been two days since I won, but winning the Dylan Thomas Prize has very immediately made me much kinder to the collection. I wrote some of those poems when I was 26 and I’m turning 36 in a few weeks. I’ve been reading the book out loud to strangers on tour for months now, and in that process I’ve been able to see all the imperfections. Winning the prize has made me love the imperfections.
On how much a poem can carry
Eric Akoto, Litro
Joy Is My Middle Name moves through girlhood, desire, addiction, sobriety, race and womanhood. Did you always know the book would carry that much life inside it?
It’s impossible to know what a book will be until it’s made, I think. But I do know that I want my poems to be funny and accessible, to feel alive and complicated. I want to be honest and real and loud, always. And I do believe that poems can carry anything. Literally one poem can be about girlhood, desire, sobriety and race all at once. Honestly, it should be.
On finding the shape of the book
Eric Akoto, Litro
How did you find the final shape of the collection?
I never really had any particular feelings about the order of the poems. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want the collection to be broken up into sections. I wanted to title the collection POEMS and for it to be a bunch of poems — no project, no big central idea or story, just all the best poems I had.
My American publisher wouldn’t let me title it POEMS because it was hard to Google — which I do understand, and I love the title we landed on. It’s more genuine and open, while still being a little snarky.
I sent all my poems to my editor at Fitzcarraldo, Rachael Allen, who I totally and completely trusted to choose which poems were the best. She ordered the poems in a way I never would have. For example, the cento, made of 100 lines from different stand-up comedians, was a poem I didn’t even think was that good, and Rachael put it first. And it made so much sense. I loved the version of my story that she created. I could not have done it so well or so objectively myself.
On poetry and boredom
Eric Akoto, Litro
What does poetry let you say that prose does not?
I love form and structure, I love magic, I love rhymes, I love big last lines. I haven’t spent my life studying and writing prose so I’m not really sure what it can say or not say. I just know I love poetry and I get bored very easily.
On influence and conversation
Eric Akoto, Litro
Were there poets or books you felt in conversation with while writing it?
Like I said, the poems were written over the course of ten years, and during that time I read so many books I loved: The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On by Khadijah Queen, Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird, SoundMachine by Rachel Zucker, Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party by Chessy Normile, specifically the poems “Matt” by Morgan Parker and “My Story in a Late Style of Fire” by Larry Levis — many, many, many others.
Also Amy Winehouse RIP, Stewart Lee’s obsessive chanting, Elvis Costello — anger brings him to the page, too — the absurd helicopter amplification at the end of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the way Billy Joel writes about being an alcoholic.
During that ten-year period, I met so many people who changed me. I got my heart broken, made lots of really stupid mistakes, got worse, got better. I was exchanging poems with friends the whole time, or at least making little erasures in my mini Fireside Chats book. I took classes with brilliant teachers. I taught and was inspired by hundreds of students. I feel like my book is in conversation with all of them.
After the prize
The force of Joy Is My Middle Name is not only in its range of subjects, but in its refusal to make that range tidy. Debevec-McKenney speaks about the collection as something made across time, through influence, error, friendship, heartbreak, study and recovery. The Dylan Thomas Prize brings the book to a wider readership; it also returns the poet to the work with a little more generosity.
That may be the most useful thing a prize can do after the announcement: not make a book perfect, but make its living imperfections easier to see.
