Event: 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize Reading
- NYS Writers Institute
- Sep 22, 2025
- 3 min read
Join Poets & Writers for an evening of poetry and conversation featuring Cyrus Cassells, winner of the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize, in conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama.
7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 30
In person at the Greene Space (44 Charlton St., New York NY 10014)
and livestreamed online.
In-person ticket with book: $16
Livestream ticket: Free
New York State Poet Laureate and 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize-recipient Patricia Spears Jones, who served as a judge for this year’s prize alongside esteemed poets James Richardson and Chase Twichell, will deliver the judges’ citation at the event.
Of Cassells’ poetry, the judges wrote, in part:
"In a world that is increasingly unstable, the brave compassion of these poems, both profound and hard won, is a rare and precious thing."
The Jackson Poetry Prize, established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation, is sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc. and named for the John and Susan Jackson family. The award honors an American poet of exceptional talent.
About Cyrus Cassells:
CYRUS CASSELLS, the 2021–2022 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982–2022 (TCU Press, 2025); Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way Books, 2024), named a Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library; The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books, 2022), a Housatonic Book Award finalist; and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power, a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada and featuring art by Octavio Quintanilla, forthcoming in 2026 from 3: A Taos Press.
Cassells is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019), and To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023). Both volumes garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. Cassells’s translation of The Man with the Oar on His Shoulder: Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (forthcoming in 2026 from Stephen F. Austin State University Press) recently received, in manuscript, Honorable Mention for the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation.
Cassells’s honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, the National Poetry Series, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.
About Pádraig Ó Tuama:
PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA is a poet with interests in conflict, language and religion. He presents Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios, and has published two anthologies (2022, 2025, both with WW Norton) from that podcast. In early 2025 Copper Canyon Press published Kitchen Hymns, his fourth poetry collection.
A freelance artist, one of Ó Tuama’s projects is poet in residence with the Cooperation and Conflict Resolution Center at Columbia University. He splits his time between Belfast and New York City.
About Poets & Writers:
Founded in 1970, Poets & Writers is the nation’s leading nonprofit organization serving creative writers.
Our mission is to foster the professional development of poets and writers, to promote communication throughout the literary community, and to help create an environment in which literature can be appreciated by the widest possible public.
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