The National Book Foundation and The New Yorker have announced the Longlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. Included among this year’s nominees is Stay Dead, the newest collection by Writing Seminars alumna Natalie Shapero.
About Stay Dead, the National Book Foundation writes: “Survival—as an artist and as a human—is interrogated by three 2025 Poetry Longlisters. Through an investigation of method acting, the commodification of the self, and abstract expressionism, Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead questions what it means to survive and thrive as a working artist living under late-stage capitalism, and wonders ‘whether being born is worth it.’ Shapero examines power, survival, and the fine line between private and public with humor and self-deprecation.” Read the full announcement here.
National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 7. The winners will be announced live at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 19. This year’s ten longlisted titles were selected from a total of 285 books submitted by publishers for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry.
Stay Dead has also been named to the Shortlist for the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize, “the most valuable and prestigious in the UK for a new collection of poetry.” As The Poetry Society reports: “Judges Michael Hofmann (Chair), Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell have chosen the T. S. Eliot Prize 2025 Shortlist from 177 poetry collections submitted by 64 British and Irish publishers. The diverse list comprises seasoned poets, two debuts, two second collections, four previously shortlisted poets and a former winner. Poets hail from the UK, Ireland, St Lucia, Canada and the USA, and publishers include both large, long-established and smaller independent presses.
Judge Michael Hofmann commented: ‘We read over 10,000 pages of poetry, Niall, Patience and I, and are left with just ten titles on our shortlist. But those titles are of great range, suggestiveness and power; from Entebbe to Manitoba, from blocks of text to threads of voice, there is something here for everyone. And that’s the joy of poetry; while it exists things are never entirely hopeless.'”
Each Shortlisted poet will receive £1,500. The T.S. Eliot Prize winner will be announced in January 2026. Previous winners include Peter Gizzi, Bhanu Kapil, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, and Seamus Heaney.
Natalie Shapero’s latest book is Stay Dead (2025), published in the U.S. by Copper Canyon Press and in the U.K. by Out-Spoken Press. Her previous poetry collections include Popular Longing, a New York Times New & Notable book; Hard Child, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize; and No Object, which received the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.
