Deborah Ager Wins the 2026 Zócalo Poetry Prize

Deborah Ager is the winner of the 2026 Zócalo Poetry Prize for “Letter from Indialantic,” which tells the story of a visit to the narrator’s recently deceased grandmother’s house on the Florida coast.

The poem, wrote one of our judges, “took me fully to that town, and to that moment in time.”

Another wrote, “This is such a lyrical and precise evocation of a missed place—that becomes in turn, a missed person. I love how blankness becomes such a resonant presence in this very personal reverie—an utterly beguiling and felt poem of memory.”

Since 2012, we have awarded the Zócalo Poetry Prize to the U.S. writer whose original poem best evokes a connection to place. This year, writers submitted more than 1,000 poems to Zócalo staff and judges for consideration. On Fridays in April, we published four honorable mention poems by Houley Koundourou, Despy Boutris, Jonathan Otamere, and Cecilia Woloch.

Deborah Ager is the founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine, author of a poetry collection, and co-editor of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. Her poems have been published in a range of journals, including Quarterly West, The Georgia Review, North American Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review, and she lives in Maryland. Zócalo is delighted to share her winning poem and an interview with Ager about old Florida, the experiences that spark her writing, and how she knows when a poem is finished.

The Zócalo Poetry Prize is awarded annually in conjunction with the Zócalo Book Prize for the best nonfiction book on community and social cohesion. Ager will receive a $1,000 prize and will be honored at our annual Book Prize event on June 25, 2026. The 2026 literary prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

Dear, I have arrived in this blip of a town

with its pastel-green houses, all cinderblocks.

The lawn sprinklers are timed to 8 pm

and so the world seems to flicker at night,

to fill with the swish of water against metal.

Over A1A hangs the banner Ja-Makin’ Me Crazy,

and the drums beat from the hotel bar,

My grandmother has been dead five months,

and it seems necessary to take a test ride.

The husband wants me to leave my purse

as collateral, and the wife shushes him

and smiles at me to go on, and I wonder

what made him distrust the world so

and now, years later, I know he had dementia.

On their bike, I ride the empty streets

of the gated neighborhood, the streets

in her very white sedan. I ride

past the white picket fences and the grass

standing at attention and the clubhouse

And I buy the bike for fifteen dollars.

And I have breakfast with my grandmother’s neighbor.

We drive to the diner in her Cadillac

and, after, she pulls birdseed from the trunk

to feed the birds that already know

she will tend to them. It feels good

to be with someone who knew my grandmother,

and I know this neighbor has no one left,

and I know the story will end with a man,

younger, who takes over her finances,

who makes her move because he wants that.

I won’t see her again. I want to say

it turned out fine. I have been thinking about kindness

and its opposite, about those who help

or fail to and how I’ve been on both sides.

That night, in the darkness, I crack the window–

the small box to find ash on the bag,

and her ash gets on my hands. And I try to brush it off

back into the box, but it doesn’t work.

I lean over the sink, washing my grandmother

down her own drain. I’m alone in a blip

of a town, the streets empty, that old bike in the garage.

I lie in bed, not thinking about what happened,

slowly as a heart at rest. You can count on this

And I think of the boy kicking the tree

at the hospice, at my sister laughing at the dead

body of a man being loaded into the ambulance,

of the woman who comforted her, because

we know the laughing was another way of crying,

and we had just seen so many dead bodies that week.

I’m thinking of the one doctor who said only God knows

when I asked how long my grandmother would live.…Read more by Sarah Rothbard