The Frost Place is pleased to announce that the 2026 Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place Poetry Seminar is Sydney Mayes.
About Sydney Mayes
Sydney Mayes is the 2026 FSG Fellow, winner of the 2025 Adrienne Rich Award and the inaugural Poet of the Year Award from ONLY POEMS. Her poems have been published in The Atlantic, Poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review.
A graduate of the Vanderbilt University MFA, Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, Lighthouse Writers, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her prose is forthcoming in the anthology Between Our Legs: Silence Breaking Stories on Gynecological Health, published by the University of Iowa Press.
A Poem
On Being Named a Pardlo Fellow
Being named the 2026 Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place is an immense honor. I have had the privilege of meeting Greg during my MFA and working with him at Community of Writers. During both encounters Greg gave expansive and illuminating talks about charting the Black American experience in poetry, both past and present. I am so grateful to have been witness to his thinking—and as a result to have been altered as a writer. It means the world to me to be able to attend the Seminar, as a student of Greg’s work and teachings and as a continuance of the legacy of poets bearing the honor of this fellowship.
Sydney Mayes
About the Fellowship
The Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place Poetry Seminar winner receives a full scholarship to attend the Seminar and gives a featured reading. The fellowship was established in recognition of Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Frost Place faculty member. We are deeply grateful to an anonymous donor who has funded this program since its inception in 2015, and to Gregory Pardlo for nominating our fellows.