Douglas Kearney a Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Congratulations to Professor Douglas Kearney, who was announced as a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry the same week he won a Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, both for the visual poetry collection I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books).
The collection is described as a "multiverse of poems that burst off the page in vivid innovative structures, deploying collage, comix, music, typography, wordplay and fiction to push literary boundaries."
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported on both awards.
This is the second Minnesota Book Award for Professor Kearney, who won for his 2021 poetry collection Sho, also the winner of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Kearney discussed I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always in a 2025 interview. An essayist and librettist, he is working on a monograph examining aesthetic rupture in Black music.
