The University of Nebraska Press is proud to announce the winner of the Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry for 2026: Ayling Dominguez and the manuscript Be Obsidian.

“My poetry is not just my own; it is a tapestry of the hearts, communities, and lands that have worldbuilt before and alongside me,” said Dominguez. “May this book be a continuation of worldbuilding, may it be both refuge and kindling. I am eternally grateful to everyone who has ever helped till the soil of my poetics, and am eager and hopeful for my debut poetry collection, Be Obsidian, to be the fiercest harvest for all who choose to join in.”

Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, educator, and culture worker. Their writing asks us who we are at our most free, and explores the subversions needed in order to arrive there.

Dominguez will be awarded $2,000 for their winning collection and it will be published in the fall of 2027.

The judge this year was Diane Seuss. Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry (2024), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and frank: sonnets (2021), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

“From the opening ars poetica, the reader is introduced to a ferocious speaker who defines their words as obsidian, knife, arrowhead, body ornament, mirror, looking glass, pyramid, and temple, and we are challenged accordingly: ‘What have you forfeited to enter?'” said Seuss of the winning collection. “I am compelled by this reversal—that the reader is doing the poet no favors by opening their book, that we must earn our way into its realm . . . The texture of Be Obsidian, from poem to poem, is pure dynamism—formal acuity, interpenetrative languages, allusions from the elders and the young, memory work, visual poems, and extravagantly unveiled history, ‘storysystems we traverse, clearing the colonial brush.'”

The honorable mention winner is Xinyue Huang. She will be awarded $1,000 and her manuscript, Occasions of Origin, will be published in the spring of 2028.  

“I have selected Occasions of Origin as the runner up for the Backwaters Prize for its freshness and depth of form as a container for its fluidic, contemplative subject,” said Seuss. “This sequence of ‘occasions’ tracks and brings narrative concreteness to the disorientation of body, mind, and language that arises out of generational displacement from home and all of home’s inferences . . . I am in awe of the elegance of these poems, where each word is a river stone, ‘a fragment of a human soul.'”

Born in Shanghai and currently based in New York City, Xinyue writes in both English and Chinese. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Shō Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the 2025 Kenyon Review Poetry Prize, and the 2026 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has been supported by the New York University Creative Writing Program, Tupelo Press, Vermont Studio Center, and Fine Arts Work Center. In fall 2026, she will serve as the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University.

“The idea for Occasions of Origin came to me during a period when I moved away from New York City and began traveling extensively from place to place across the United States for various fellowships and residencies,” said Xinyue. “As I found myself disoriented, displaced, and often incurably lost and isolated in rural America, I kept returning to a story my mother once told me: she has no official record of her city of birth. She was born in a temporary settlement in Xinjiang whose location was never marked on a map. This project is an attempt to reckon, secondhand, with my mother’s loss of origin while navigating my own sense of disorientation in the country I now call home. I’m deeply honored that this manuscript received an Honorable Mention for the Backwaters Prize, and especially grateful to Dianne Seuss for believing in this book. It means a lot to me that the book that grew out of so much longing and searching will soon make its way into the world.”

The 2025 Backwaters Prize winner was Sanam Sheriff. Their winning collection HUM will publish in October 2026.  

The University of Nebraska Press acquired the Backwaters Press in 2018 and continues its yearly poetry prize.