Northeastern University English professor Juliana Spahr won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her recent collection, “Ars Poeticas,” a politically charged meditation on poetry’s role in what she describes as “dark times.” “Ars Poeticas,” which literally means “art of poetry,” weaves together notes on ecological crises, the rise of authoritarian populism and the possibilities of collective care and resistance. In the book, Spahr, who is also a scholar of contemporary American literature, tracks developments across the nuclear age — from the famous Castle Bravo test on through the ages — to today’s moment of crisis, species extinction and political upheaval.
The book gets its title from the Roman poet Horace’s foundational treatise on the art of poetry, which has inspired a tradition across cultures and languages of poets writing their own “ars poeticas,” or meditations on the art of poetry. In an interview with Northeastern Global News last year, Spahr described “Ars Poeticas” as moving deeper into those sometimes thorny questions about poetry’s “social” role, broader utility and even complicity in larger systems. In one poem, titled “Will There be Singing,” she writes: “I thought for a while there were two sorts of poets. / Poets who write the terrible nation into existence / and poets screwing around doing something else.”
