May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

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The May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize is named for May Sarton, the renowned novelist, memoirist, poet, and feminist (1912-1995) who lived for many years in Nelson, New Hampshire, not far from Peterborough, home of William L. Bauhan Publishing. In 1967, she approached Bauhan and asked him to publish her book of poetry, As Does New Hampshire. She wrote the collection to celebrate the bicentennial of Nelson, and dedicated it to the residents of the town.

May Sarton was a prolific writer of poetry, novels, and perhaps what she is best known for—nonfiction on growing older (Recovering: A Journal, Journal of Solitude, among others.) She considered herself a poet, first, though, and in honor of that and to celebrate the centenary of her birth in 2012, Sarah Bauhan, who inherited her father’s small publishing company, launched the prize.

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Submissions for the 2026 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize are now open!

Meet our judge for 2026 – Dzvinia Orlowsky!

Award-winning Pushcart Prize poet, translator, and founding editor of Four Way Books (1993–2001), DZVINIA ORLOWSKY is the author of seven poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry, and Those Absences Now Closest (2024) named to Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. She has received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” won a 2019 New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Robert Pinsky.

Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella include Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021), a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize, and ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry, and winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize; and Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), supported by a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and named a 2025 PEN America Literary Award finalist.

Her co-translation with Ali Kinsella of Oleksander Dovzhenko’s “film-tale” The Enchanted Desna is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in spring 2026.

Our 2025 winner, Hugo Dos Santos!

Hugo dos Santos is an award-winning writer and translator. He is the author of Reduction in Force (Bauhan Publishing, forthcoming 2026), winner of the May Sarter New Hampshire Poetry Award, and Then, there (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), a collection of Newark stories. His translations include Homecoming(Arquipélago Press, 2024) and A Child in Ruins (Writ Large Press, 2016), a staff pick by The Paris Review Daily.

Born in Lisboa, Portugal, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Hugo writes toward questions of diaspora, belonging, and memory. His poetry and fiction illuminate the beauty, complexity, and struggles of the immigrant experience and urban life, while his translations bring contemporary Portuguese literature to English-speaking audiences.

Hugo has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and the Disquiet International Literary Program. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in the United States, Portugal, and India, appearing in Barrelhouse, Bat City Review, Electric Literature, Hobart, The Common, The Fanzine, and elsewhere.

He lives in New Jersey.

Check out his upcoming collection, Reduction in Force

Available for pre-order. Ships mid-March

We are pleased to share the results of our 2025 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize with all of our treasured submitters. We received a record number of submissions this year, and as in previous years, it always leaves our judge with a difficult decision to make.

Anthony Walton chose as the winner Reduction in Force, by Hugo Dos Santos of Flemington, New Jersey, out of over 500 worthy submissions.

Anthony chose as the other finalists (in no particular order):

Carne – Mia Leonin, Miami, Florida

Coming Out Hot – Lizabeth Kingsley, Westfield, New Jersey

Fables – Bruce Bond, Denton, Texas

gloss – Maureen Thorson, Falmouth, Maine

Psalms of Innocence – JoAnne McFarland, Brooklyn, New York

This Is Not That – Jeff Stumpo, Litchfield, New Hampshire

Hugo will receive $1,000 prize money, publication of the collection with our spring 2025 titles, 50 author copies, and distribution with Casemate IPM.

Anthony had this to say about Hugo’s poems:

“In a literary moment when so much lyric poetry seems preoccupied with private experience and ready-made epiphany, Hugo Dos Santos’s Reduction in Force is revelatory. It is, yes, an examination of the self, but it performs its review through lenses and landscapes that are rarely utilized in poetry, which is to say the cold and bureaucratized reality of the American corporate world, and the ways that world can affect and pressure the individuals and families who attempt to build their lives under the dominion of those companies. Dos Santos maps the experience of a true believer who must come to terms with the betrayal now inherent in what used to be known as the American dream and work through the humiliation of starting over. He does so in poems that are consistently surprising in content, satisfyingly varied in form and tone, and utterly, winningly, trustworthy to the reader. I haven’t seen anything like this book before, and it heralds the arrival of an original poet, with the promise of more originality and excitement ahead.”