Pushcart Prize Nominations
Each year, the Iowa Poetry Association's Editor and Associate Editors collaborate to select nominees from the newest edition of Lyrical Iowa. Please join us in congratulating and wishing the nominees success.
About Pushcart Prize Nominations
The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in their annual collections.
Winners of the Prize have included the likes of Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford and John Updike, to name only a handful. No wonder simply being nominated for a Pushcart makes you feel as if you've won something.
Each fall, editors from small magazines and independent book presses worldwide are invited to submit up to six nominations. The nominations may be any combination of poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs or stand-alone excerpts from novels. Translations, reprints and both traditional and experimental writing are also welcome.
2026 Pushcart Prize Nominees
"grief is a tuna fish sandwich" by Sandy Deyoe (Des Moines) GRIEF IS A TUNA FISH SANDWICH loss and decline suffering and distress leave you weeping at the kitchen table your young HVAC tech eyeing the door it’s always the water heater the bad haircut the broken shoelace tipping you past sadness into gasping sobs your apologies land in the twelfth awkward silence of the morning customer service reps and funeral directors people next to you in the grocery store parking lot long behind you in this black hole of too much everyone says it will get better so much truth smothered in clichés you don’t want to hear low expectations and freezing showers always the answer to questions you didn’t want to ask
"Two-pew Chapel on Iowa Highway 6" by Lívia Stein Freitas (Curitiba, Brazil -- Grinnell College) TWO-PEW CHAPEL ON IOWA HIGHWAY 6 When sunlight bubbles up to the roof— in the car, on the plane, in the dorm room— you should ask for more. A house sparrow tiptoed over Arbor Lake during a forest walk. Its ripple still tickles me into sleep when I struggle to. At Frontier Café, old couples' laughter unfurls me back into a sunny afternoon in my grandma’s kiddie pool. From the airplane window, the lines over February cornfields look like skate marks on sea ice. We landed safely and on time. Before I return to Paraná, I’ll give my home of four years one last farmer’s wave. I’ll let the wind pirouette on my neck during a snowstorm. I’ll pray for memories with bur oak roots. More chorus frog hymns. More bumble bee buzz. Quiet respite on the roadside. There is no such thing as a small miracle.
"Long Drive" by Kelly Madigan (Castana) LONG DRIVE When the car was packed and running my dad would scoop us from our beds and carry us—still pajamaed, still sleeping— through the dark yard to the vehicle. Sometimes we would half-wake in his arms, restless, and other times find ourselves transported a hundred dream miles, blinking at strange scenery, uncertain how we got there. There is no difference between this and how a poem works.
"Softly rise and gently fall" by Delia Ralston (Waterloo) SOFTLY RISE AND GENTLY FALL Softly rise and gently fall Each breath Floating in the mist of me Glide over the water, light and airy Dragonfly over a summer pond Ripples an aftershock of flight
"penumbra" by Dawn Terpstra (Lynnville) PENUMBRA my mother talked about him two weeks before she died the way moon shadow slides silently across an afternoon sun a man named johnny from oregon asked her to marry him but she said no and i’ll never know why she pasted his memory into the days before her last words, or his unlabeled black and white photo into an album reflecting slender conifers and snow-covered mountains his presence eclipsed by other forces she could not see coming— the end of a war, a future husband, the gravitational pull of a midwestern farm— in hospice how could it be otherwise but to recall bodies on both sides of the sun, orbiting somewhere between shadowlands and coronas
"Olympus OM-1 Snapshot, 1975" by Shelly Reed Thieman (West Des Moines) OLYMPUS OM-1 SNAPSHOT, 1975 I am slathered in Coppertone, slick with the sweat of strawberry-iced donuts and hashbrown grease. I’m Laffy Taffy, pink Converse high-tops, and pock faced with late summer sun. Perched on the banana seat of my orange Stingray with a tangle of grosgrain ribbons tied to the sissy bar, I am poised for all-day latchkey flight through Beaverdale. In the bicycle basket bought with babysitting cash— my daily horoscope, TiGER beat magazine, a PBJ and my crush’s address penned in secret code inside a Howard Johnson’s matchbook. With a wad of Bubble Yum churning in my mouth, I pedal away in the scorch of a dodgeball sun. This wild cherry, lip-balmed Aquarian is determined to set fire to some lucky boy’s heart.