Hobart and William Smith Colleges professor Daniel Schonning has won the Poetry Society of America's Four Quartets Prize for a sequence from his debut poetry collection.
The award carries a $20,000 prize and recognizes a unified sequence of poems published in the United States. Schonning, a 2016 HWS graduate, is among the youngest recipients and one of the few to win for a debut collection, according to the colleges.
Published by the University of Chicago Press, the collection, "As When Waking," contains 26 abecedarian poems built around changing alphabetical patterns. The collection ranges from the foreclosure of a family home to an imagined door to the underworld.
Poets Paisley Rekdal, Charif Shanahan and Brian Teare selected Schonning for the award. The finalist field included Juliana Spahr, whose collection "Ars Poetica" won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
HWS Associate Professor Geoffrey Babbitt described Schonning's collection as complex and ambitious. Teare praised the book's formal control and range in the judges' citation.
Schonning's work appeared in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology and has been published in POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily, Orion Magazine and The Yale Review. He also serves as a poetry editor for the Seneca Review.
Schonning studied creative writing and international relations at HWS and later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Colorado State University. He is a professor of practice in English and creative writing and directs the HWS Debate team, which finished 17th in the world in 2024.
FingerLakes1.com is the region’s leading all-digital news publication. The company was founded in 1998 and has been keeping residents informed for more than two decades. Have a lead? Send it to news@fingerlakes1.com.