Furious Flower Announces 2026 Poetry Prize Winner Wes Matthews
News
Furious Flower Poetry Center is delighted to announce that prize judge Major Jackson has selected the winner of the 2026 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Wes Matthews. Matthew’s winning poems Heirloom; They Say That When a Man Has Nothing; and Nat Turner Travels Back to Childhood.
“It was a difficult decision,” Jackson shared. “I lived with these poems in body and kept coming back to the poems in the Heirloom manuscript, whose music, subject matter, and memorable lines sank into me.”
Wes Matthews is a Detroit-born, DC-based poet and educator. His poems have appeared in GulfCoast, Muzzle, Bellevue, and elsewhere. He graduated from Penn in 2023 with a B.A. in Anthropology and Religious Studies. In 2025, he earned a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) degree from Harvard Divinity School. Wes is a 2025 Cave Canem Fellow and a former youth poet laureate of Philadelphia.
I consider it an immense honor to have been selected for the Furious Flower Poetry Prize,” says Matthews. “I am deeply indebted to everyone who has laid eyes on my work over the years—friends, mentors, editors, and so on. I do not celebrate this achievement alone, but with them.”
Jackson also selected Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe as the honorable mention for her poem Silvie.
As a survivor of gender violence, Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe has dedicated her life to using art and ancestral rituals to transform trauma into power. Named “Medicine Woman of Racial Healing" by the elders of her tradition, Sherina is a Cultural Architect. She directs The TETRA: Digital Underground Railroad, a secret liberation journey that hosts over 31,000 “Riders” with her partner, Chace Morris. Her healing methodologies are taught at Howard, Harvard, and Yale. Sharpe is a two-time Kresge Fellow (2024 & 2014), Cave Canem Fellow, & VONA author.
“I am so deeply honored by this Honorable Mention and to be a part of this tradition,” Sharpe shared. She hopes that her words “will join this legacy of brilliance and be a gift for the next generations.”
Matthews and Sharpe will read their work alongside Major Jackson at the Poetry Prize Reading September 2026 at James Madison University. Their work, as well as a selected poem from each finalist, will be published in Obsidian.
