Sacred Poetry Contest 2026: Celebration of Winners and Finalists

Join CLA members and friends to celebrate the 2026 Sacred Poetry Contest winners and finalists. This year’s Sacred Poetry contest asked writers to compose poems in response to a curated selection of sacred art which can be found at https://www.catholicliteraryarts.org/2025-sacred-poetry.

This year’s judge is Daniel Tobin.

Daniel Tobin is the author of ten books of poems, including Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year for 2018 by the New York Times and The Washington Independent Review of Books, The Stone in the Air: A Suite of Poems from the German of Paul Celan, and The Mansions, winner of the National Indie Excellence Award in Poetry.

His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, the Stephen Meringoff Award from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, and fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

His critical and editorial works include Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th /century to the Present, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (with Pimone Triplett), To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge, Awake in America, On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence and most recently The Odeon: Essays on Poetry. A chapbook, From the Distances of Sleep: Gloss Arias I, appeared in 2025 from Staircase Books. Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems, will appear in 2026.

This event will include:

· Comments by this year’s judge

· Reading by winners and finalists