Announcing the 2026 NaPoMo Winner and Finalists!

We are happy to announce the winner and finalists of our NaPoMo 2026 competition. Iron Horse Literary Review’s annual NaPoMo is an opportunity for poets to submit their best work in celebration of National Poetry Month. Each year we dedicate an issue of only 10 poems to this special month!

This year we selected Todd Davis's "Alverdia Finds a Fox in the Neighbor's Trap." Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry—Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems; Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and professor of environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University.

We are also pleased to announce our finalists and runner-ups:

Runner-ups:

Kaecey McCormick, "Altar of Memory"

Allison Field Bell, "Boulder Problem"

Other Finalists:

Michelle Alexander “Black Earth”

Jack Anderson, “From a Patio Across the Boulevard"

Allison Field Bell, “Foe”

Alaina Craib, "June Poem"

Alaina Craib, "2,500 years ago, a man goes missing in Lille Vildmose"

Majda Gama, “Elegy at the Chain Bridge, Washington DC”

Shakiba Hashemi, “Aftermath”

Daniel Obi, “Directions for a Time to Come”

Congratulations to Todd and our finalists!