2026 promises to be a standout year in the realm of short stories and poetry. From insightful short story collections to a wealth of boundary-pushing poetry that examines the darkest parts of human nature in a new light, these upcoming collections will feed our minds and souls.
One Sun Only by Camille Bordas
Featuring her most well-known stories alongside previously unpublished works, Bordas illuminates the mysteries of life without trying to dissect every minute monent of complexity. Some characters win big, while others lose even bigger, but every one of them has something to say about the human experience that will linger with readers long after they turn the final page.
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Fire Series by Kelly Hoffer
Fire can be both a force of destruction and regeneration, embodying conflicting ideas of knowledge and anger. Hoffer delves into the significance of fire and language itself to investigate America’s pressure on women to be morally upright caregivers, even as its government forces the country into conflicts that defy all sense of morality. The rage that arises from these unjust expectations becomes the undercurrent for these sharp, obsessive poems.
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Brawler by Lauren Groff
Each story in Groff’s new collection can be read alone or together, brimming with life and exhilaration in an exploration of the dark and light sides within all of us. Under Groff’s careful attention, characters fumble through their lives while teaching readers a thing or two about what it means to be human.
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A Suit or a Suitcase by Maggie Smith
Do we wear our bodies like a suit, or do they carry us through life like a suitcase? This is the question Smith seeks to answer through these tender, probing poems, ultimately providing insight about what it means to be human and the extent to which we change (if we truly change) throughout our lives.
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Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar
Award-winning stories from El-Mohtar are compiled for the first time, each providing a glimpse into dangerous, fantastical fairy tale worlds and the nature of life itself. The stories take various formats, from prose to reference materials and everything in between.
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The Central Avenue Poetry Prize 2026 edited by Beau Adler
This third edition of The Central Avenue Poetry Prize highlights acclaimed and emerging poets from around the world, inviting readers to revel in the best contemporary poetry of the year and find common ground with others. Within these pages, poetry becomes not only an art, but also an act of being.
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The Memory Museum by M Lin
Stretching from China to America and from the present day into the future, Lin explores the lives of China’s One-Child Generation with a tender yet playful perspective. An elderly woman in a dystopian landscape looks back on her grandfather’s village, a filmmaker grapples with censorship and her view of motherhood, and more in this collection. Memory and the future are a hair’s width apart in this captivating debut.
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The Size of Your Joy by Elise M. Powers
Womanhood, like life, is full of contradictions, a constant back-and-forth between joy and sorrow. Powers’ poems delve into the complex relationships between women to highlight the cycles of shame and self-censorship that keep women stuck. Powers demonstrates that Joy can be found by liberating oneself from these cycles and embracing hope in the face of adversity.
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Divinations on Survival by Natalie Linh Bolderston
Bolderston’s sweeping debut collection explores her matrilineal heritage, leaping from ancient times to 1930s China and 1970s Vietnam. Mothers, daughters, and deities coexist under the malevolent shadow of war, highlighting the unbreakable spirit of women in the face of displacement, violence, and tragedy.
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If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop
Translated into English for the first time, this bestselling Korean story collection investigates the intersection of life, love, and death through a speculative/science fiction lens. Material and abstract collide and absorb each other as characters process their emotions against the weight of the universe.
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