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We’re so happy to announce that two UMP titles have been honored at the 2026 Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Awards! These two titles represent the masterful work of our Poets on Poetry series and our dedication to supporting our authors in succeeding beyond a book’s publication.

Pegasus Award

The Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism “commends an outstanding book-length work of criticism published in the United States in the prior calendar year, including biographies, essay collections, and critical editions that consider the subject of poetry or poets. Jason Schneiderman’s Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture won this year’s award and Philip Metres’s Dispatches from the Land of Erasure: Essays and Conversations was also a finalist.

Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Jason Schneiderman grapples with the way that digital culture has begun to reshape America’s poetry landscape, examining this profound shift in the way that poetry is written, read, and taught.

Dispatches from the Land of Erasure: Essays and Conversations by Philip Metres explores the struggle for a just peace through reading Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish writers of conscience who contend with the wall of silence around the issue of Palestine.

The committee’s citation for Jason’s book reads: “Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture gathers seven of Jason Schneiderman’s essays, but as a whole, the book has its own argument, or more precisely, its own devastating questions,” said the 2026 judge, Kazim Ali. “What happens to the most ancient of arts, the one that moved from the mouth to the page once upon a time, when it is surrounded by the digital and ephemeral? What is at stake for poetic form and the poetic line? Schneiderman’s thinking is neither technophobic nor regressive, but rather humanist and forward-thinking.”

Jason Schneiderman, in response to winning the Pegasus Award, said: “The Pegasus Award has been an incredible form of recognition and encouragement. I’m still walking on a cloud. I’m working on so many projects; now I feel like I can do all of them!”  

Philip Metres, in response to being named a Pegasus Award finalist, said: “Dispatches from the Land of Erasure was born out of both deep pain and the belief that poetry could foster both beauty and justice. The fact that the book exists at all is a marvel to me. When I heard that "Dispatches" was named a finalist for the Pegasus Award, I felt nothing but gratitude, remembering the years not only of reading and thinking and writing, but also of having conversations--and disputes--with writers whom I deeply respect. We live in a moment where the traditional organs of literary criticism appear to be in collapse. We're living in a toxic media ecosystem that demands self-branding and fawning, followers and likes and reposts. Real criticism demands difficult assessments and uncomfortable conversations. Real criticism requires both passionate and dispassionate assessment and argument. An art without criticism is a mere product. A world without critics is totalitarian and genocidal.”

The Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation aims to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering space for all to create, experience, and share poetry. The Foundation’s Pegasus Awards celebrate the best in poetry, and directly support and reward poets, critics, and scholars.