The third annual Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival took place on April 17 and 18, 2026 at Hamilton Smith Hall on the University of New Hampshire campus in Durham, a free, two-day gathering of readings, workshops, multi-genre performances, and a small press fair, open to all. Founded and managed by UNH’s English Department through Yas Press, and made possible by the YAS Foundation in honour of poet and poetry lover Nossrat Yassini, the festival has quickly become one of the more generously conceived poetry events in the American northeast, one that reaches simultaneously toward established names and the next generation of readers and writers.

The 2026 edition drew a headline lineup of considerable range. Friday evening opened with the Nossrat Yassini Book Prize reading, featuring Cornelius Eady, co-founder of Cave Canem, who also served as this year’s final prize judge alongside Diannely Antigua and JeFF Stumpo. Saturday carried its own momentum: an afternoon Phillis Wheatley Peters Tribute brought together Porsha Olayiwola, the third poet laureate of Boston and world poetry slam champion, and Dr. Ebele Okpokwasili-Johnson and Amanda Shea, whose work sits at the intersection of poetry, performance, and the African and Afro-diasporic oral tradition.

At the centre of the festival’s prize announcements was Nigerian poet Adedayo Agarau, named the winner of the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize for his debut collection The Years of Blood, published by Fordham University Press. The prize honours a first book by a U.S.-based poet of exceptional promise, recognising both the writer and the press behind the work, and carries a $10,000 award, a featured reading at the festival, and a national spotlight intended to extend the life of a debut collection beyond publication. The Years of Blood confronts the harrowing reality of ritual killings and child abductions that terrorised Nigeria from the turbulent pre-democratic era to the present, set against the backdrop of rural Ibadan, where collective trauma and the relationship between fear and memory are rendered through lyrical and often dreamlike language. Since its release, the book has been well received by critics and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 best poetry books of 2026.

Agarau is a Wallace Stegner Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine and a Poetry Reviews Editor at The Rumpus, and previously published the chapbooks Origin of Name through the African Poetry Book Fund and The Arrival of Rain through Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. That the previous year’s Nossrat Yassini winner was Ghanaian-descended poet Kweku Abimbola for Saltwater Demands a Psalm makes Agarau’s win part of a quietly significant pattern of African excellence at this still-young prize.

Submissions across all categories are expected to reopen in September 2026, details will be available at unhpoetry.com.