Litro USA / Poetry
Cecily Parks’s The Seeds Wins the 2026 UNT Rilke Prize
The $10,000 award recognises a book by a mid-career poet. Parks’s third collection moves through landscape, motherhood, damage and endurance.
A prize for a collection looking closely at a damaged world.
The Seeds has been selected as the winner of the 2026 UNT Rilke Prize, a $10,000 award for a book by a mid-career poet published in the preceding year.
The collection was published by Alice James Books and has also been named a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award and selected for NPR’s Books We Love.
Cecily Parks’s The Seeds has been selected as the winner of the 2026 UNT Rilke Prize, a $10,000 award recognising a book by a mid-career poet published in the preceding year.
Published by Alice James Books, The Seeds is Parks’s third collection. The poems move through fields, yards, woods, fences, public land and private damage, asking what it means to keep looking closely at the natural world when that world is marked by both abundance and harm.
The collection is not interested in nature as escape. Its landscapes are lived in, pressured and changed by human presence. The speaker watches with a poet’s precision and, often, a mother’s urgency: attending to plants, animals, children’s questions, and the harder knowledge that damage is everywhere.
That tension gives the book its force. The Seeds is alert to beauty, but not consoled by it. It stays with the difficulty of sustaining hope without pretending that attention alone repairs the world.
The UNT Rilke Prize judges praised the collection’s artistry and vision. Parks will visit the University of North Texas on November 4 and 5 for a reading and book signing.
Parks is the author of three poetry collections: The Seeds, O’Nights and Field Folly Snow. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Nation, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry and elsewhere.
She is also the guest editor of Best New Poets 2025 and editor of The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. Parks teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and will join the Visiting Faculty at the Michener Center for Writers in fall 2026.
The UNT Rilke Prize, founded in 2011, is awarded by Creative Writing and the Department of English at the University of North Texas.
This year’s finalists were Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s My Perfect Cognate, Paula Bohince’s A Violence and Cynthia Cruz’s Sweet Repetition.
Cecily Parks
Cecily Parks is the author of three poetry collections, including The Seeds, O’Nights and Field Folly Snow. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and will be on the Visiting Faculty at the Michener Center for Writers in fall 2026.
Photo by Jessica Attie.
Source: University of North Texas Creative Writing / Department of English announcement for the 2026 UNT Rilke Prize.
