Kansas Book Award

2025 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry Winner Announced

Congratulations to Jesse Nathan, winner of the 2025 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry for Eggtooth.

The 2025 award presentation will be held on Friday, September 19, 2025, 4:00 p.m., at the Plass Learning Resources Center (1731 Plass Ave), Room 120, the day before the annual Kansas Book Festival on the Washburn University campus.

Nathan teaches in the English department at UC Berkeley, and his poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The Believer, among others. Eggtooth, his debut collection, has also been recognized with the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry and the 2024 Housatonic Book Award.

Judge Michael Kleber-Diggs, who won the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in 2022 for his poetry collection Worldly Things, served as judge. About his selection, he wrote:

"Eggtooth by Jesse Nathan is a rich, musical, stunning collection that simultaneously feels deeply rooted in ancient practices and wholly new. In poems that are situated in rural Kansas and northern California, Nathan is, by turns, plain spoken and incantatory, earthen and artful. His confident and original voice arises from an extraordinary gift for attention, recall, and presence, presence both in the captivating moments that inspire the poet and in the moments when he sculpted those memories into verse. Tremendous care was required both in the observation and in the telling, and that care is evident throughout. Eggtooth never stopped surprising me with its new ways of seeing and thinking about people and places I long ago claimed as familiar.”

2025 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry (2026 in Fiction, 2027 in Nonfiction)

The Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award "in Poetry" "in Fiction" and "in Creative Nonfiction" alternates yearly for each genre. The prize, of $1,000, will be awarded to a book that meets the guidelines, and the winner will be invited to Washburn University Library for a reading and presentation ceremony.

Behind the name: Learn more about the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award.

Call for Nominations and Submissions

This award is sponsored by the Center for Kansas Studies, the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at the University Library and the Friends of the Library.