HWS News
3 August 2026 • Alums Schonning ’16 Wins Major Poetry Prize
Professor of Practice Daniel Schonning earns the Four Quartets Prize in recognition of his debut poetry collection As When Waking.
Professor of Practice and Director of HWS Debate Daniel Schonning ’16 is the winner of the Four Quartets Prize, awarded by the Poetry Society of America, following the publication of his debut collection of poems with the University of Chicago Press.
Titled As When Waking, Schonning’s collection is a compilation of a unique style of poetry called abecedarians. This style begins with a poem whose lines read alphabetically A-Z, followed by a poem reading B-A, and so on for 26 poems. He explores a wide range of themes in his piece, from the foreclosure of a family home to a door to the underworld. The poems are “An exploration of poetic form, centering on the alphabet as both its medium and constraint,” says the University of Chicago Press.
Three renowned poets – Paisley Rekdal, Charif Shanahan and Brian Teare – selected Schonning for this award. The judges host a number of accomplishments, from a Poet Laureate of Utah to a Guggenheim Fellow. Schonning will receive $20,000 along with the prize.
Schonning is among the youngest recipients in the prize's history and among the few poets to receive the honor for a debut collection.
Schonning also received the award over a distinguished field of finalists that included Juliana Spahr, whose collection Ars Poetica won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
“The magnitude of Schonning’s achievement is tremendous,” says Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Writing and Rhetoric Geoffrey Babbitt. “And when you consider the context of As When Waking in the running alongside a sequence from Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poetica, you know the competition was as formidable as it gets. Schonning’s book is complex and ambitious, but its many impressive feats are carried out, as the judges’ citation puts it, ‘with the apparent ease of a virtuoso.”’
Judge Brian Teare, author of “Poem Bitten by a Man,” says “...Schonning cycles through abecedarian combinations and permutations that spell the world as he knows it...As When Waking is a first book of rare formal mastery and metaphysical grace.”
This achievement follows his feature in the Best New Poets Anthology in 2024. Schonning’s work has notably been featured in POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily, Orion Magazine and The Yale Review. He additionally serves as a poetry editor for the Seneca Review.
In his time as a student at HWS, Schonning studied creative writing and international relations. He went on to pursue an MFA at Colorado State. He now is a Professor of Practice in the English and Creative Writing department and coaches the HWS Debate team. He has coached the team through their strongest years in program history, including a 17th place finish in the world in 2024.
Earlier in the summer, Schonning delivered the Commencement Address at his high school alma mater The Harvey School in Katonah, N.Y. Read more about the ceremony and his address here.
