In 2026, the Ron Offen Poetry Prize visiting poet is Imani Elizabeth Jackson.

Imani Elizabeth Jackson is a poet from Chicago. Her writings appear in Apogee, BOMB, TriQuarterly, Annulet, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Futurepoem’s 2020 Other Futures Award, the Arkansas International’s inaugural C.D. Wright Award (selected by Hanif Abdurraqib), and several awards from Brown University. Under the name mouthfeel, she co-authored the poetry-cookbook Consider the Tongue (2019) with S*an D. Henry-Smith; she also contributed to Francesca Capone’s Weaving Language: Lexicon (Essay Press, 2022). She is the author of the chapbooks saltsitting (reissued by g l o s s, 2020) and Context for arboreal exchanges (Belladonna*, 2023) and the book Flag (Futurepoem, 2024). Imani also collaborates with Madeleine Le Cesne and Isra Rene as donk, an experimental kitchen.

Established in memory of poet and editor Ron Offen, the Ron Offen Poetry Prize brings one Chicago poet to campus each year for a public reading. In addition, the Program in Creative Writing administers a call for submissions from students, who can submit 3–5 pages of original work for a chance to be selected by the visiting poet to be introduced by and read alongside them at the event. The selected student writer is invited to a celebratory dinner with the visiting writer and Creative Writing faculty members after their reading. In addition, the selected student will receive a prize of $100. The Ron Offen Poetry Prize series is a wonderful opportunity for the creative writing community to celebrate its students’ achievements and for students to share their work and connect with established Chicago-area poets.