Sunken Garden Poetry Prize

Hill-Stead Museum is proud to partner with Tupelo Press to offer the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, a prestigious national poetry prize for adult writers. An independent literary press located in North Adams, Massachusetts, Tupelo is one of the most respected publishers of poetry in the country, both in terms of content and production.

Established in 2002, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize has drawn submissions from around the country, judged by renowned poets such as Martha Collins, Patricia Smith, and Tony Hoagland. The winner receives a cash prize, an introductory reading at Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, and publication of a chapbook. Hill-Stead began partnering with Tupelo Press for the publication of the chapbook in 2013.


2021 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize

Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that judge, Mark Bibbins, has selected Bed by Elizabeth Metzger of Los Angeles, California as winner of the 2021 Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Award!

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Horsethief Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others. Her prose has recently been published in ConjunctionsLiterary Hub, Guernica, and Boston Review. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find more of her writing at elizabethmetzger.com. Photo by Attanasio_HEADSHOTS


Past Winners

  • 2020 – Dujie Tahat for Salat 
  • 2019 – Kristin George Bagdanov for Diurne
  • 2018 – Chaun Ballard for Flight
  • 2017 – Emily Jungmin Yoon for Ordinary Misfortunes
  • 2016 – Suzanne Parker for Feed
  • 2015 – Hadara Bar-Nadav for Fountain and Furnace
  • 2014 – Ted Lardner for We Practice For It
  • 2013 – Mary Jo Firth Gillett for Dance Like a Flame
  • 2012 – First Place: Marilyn Annucci for Waiting Room; Second Place: Sue Burton for Canticle to Self’s Jewelry, Lincoln Way West
  • 2011 – First Place: Patricia Hale for Composition and Flight; Second Place: David Watts for At High Altitude
  • 2010 – First Place: Ginny Lowe Connors for Under the Porch; Second Place: Kate Lebo for Sugarspill, Washington
  • 2008/09 – First Place: Don Thompson for Back Roads; Second Place: Kim Roberts for Exhibitionist
  • 2006 – First Place: Renée Ashley for The Museum of Lost Wings; Second Place: John Surowiecki for Bolivia Street
  • 2005 – First Place: Brad Davis for Short List of Wonders
  • 2004 – First Place: Suzanne Cleary for Blue Cloth