Early Career Writers of Poetry 2026

Dr.Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024), which received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poetry guidebook, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets, a pedagogical book for new and experienced poets, appeared in June 2024 from the University of Akron Press. A poet and essayist, Tyler’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Poetry, Lit Hub, River Teeth, The Rumpus, and more. She is the author of the poetry books City Scattered (2022), Hawk Parable (2019), Tongue Lyre (2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (2021). She has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Chicago, teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute, and lives in New York City.

Dr. Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor and educator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her publications include Some Deer, (Broken Sleep, 2024), Corpses (Sublunary Editions, 2020), Disrupted Blue and Other Poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock, 2021) and Strangers Wave (zimZalla, 2023). In the UK, Vik’s work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, PN Review, The Rialto, Magma; in the US: Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, The Indianapolis Review and Tiny Molecules. Vik co-edits Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius and Firmament online for Sublunary Editions. She is a Poetry School Tutor and has a PhD in ‘Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry’ from the University of Birmingham. Vik also founded Disrupted Blue Indie Press Publicity and works with small presses all over the world. In May 2025, Vik’s third photo poetry collection Persona Digitalia was selected for the inaugural P5—PhotoWorks series.

Guggenheim fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books, including the poetry volumes Death Styles and Toxicon and Arachne (both Nightboat Books); the eco-decadent poetics book The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series); and the verse-play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, which was selected to inaugurate the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Women Performance Writers. In 2022, McSweeney received the Shelley Memorial Award for "poetic genius" from the Poetry Society of America. With Johannes Göransson, she is the co-founder of the international press Action Books which has help build global audiences for poets and translators like Kim Hyesoon, Raúl Zurita, Don Mee Choi and others. She lives in the Great Lakes region of the US and is Chair of the English Department at the University of Notre Dame.

rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). mclennan is both the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival and the publisher of Canada’s most prolific small press, above/ground press – which he has edited for over 30 years.