The 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize Winners and Finalists
We’re thrilled to congratulate Margarita Cruz, the winner of Frontier Poetry’s 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize! Her poem “Echo-cardiogram,” was selected by Gbenga Adesina as the first place winner. Our readers and editors were truly taken and appreciative of the heartbreak and healing shared during this contest. Thank you so much for sharing your poetry with our team. As always, we are so grateful for the continued support of our submitters, readers, and friends.
Margarita Cruz has been awarded the first-place prize of $3000. Edison Angelbello was selected as the second-place winner and Maryam Daftari as the third place winner. Find the full list of our winners and finalists below. We look forward to publishing their work throughout the month of May and early June.
Thank you to all who submitted, it was a pleasure to consider your work.
WINNER
Margarita Cruz
“Echo-cardiogram”
Margarita Cruz was raised between Tamaulipas, MX and Phoenix, AZ. She is a part-time educator, member of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, and contributor for the Arizona Daily Sun. She has received support from the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, Lighthouse Writers, Macondo and others. In 2026, her manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her works have been featured in Ploughshares, Rattle and the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day series among others. Find more of her at shortendings.com.
SECOND PLACE
Edison Angelbello
“Sometime After Your Suicide, I Find You in the Apocalypse”
Edison Angelbello is a poet from Fort Lauderdale, FL. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and teaches creative writing at UNC Charlotte. He earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University, where he was selected as the Lucie Brock-Broido Undergraduate Teaching Fellow. His poetry has been published in The Writer’s Foundry Review, Atlantis, Cathexis Northwest Press, and elsewhere.
THIRD PLACE
Maryam Daftari
“The Geography of the Unfinished Room”
She started writing poetry as an undergraduate, winning several awards. Maryam’s poems have been chosen for publication in many of the annual editions of Lyrical Iowa and San Diego Poetry Annual (2013-2025), A Year in Ink (2023-2024), in Stand Forth and A Step Between, publications of Iowa’s Society of Great River Poets. Her poems have also appeared in an anthology of San Diego poets entitled Sundays at Liberty Station. She has won 1st place in Traditional Poetry Style in a competition by the Iowa Poetry Association in 2024 for “As It Rises One Degree.” Maryam is the author of five poetry collections, Like Magic but Real, Haiku Workbook and Kintsugi: Poems of Hope and Healing, Embrace the Dawn and Poetic Weavings at Moonlight Beach.
The Finalists
Ashley Mo
Hilda Davis
Mistee St Clair
Heather Phelan
Martin Farawell
Alicia Gignoux
Valarie Hastings
