Jesse Nathan wins 2025 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry

           Topeka, Kan. - Jesse Nathan of Berkeley, Calif. is the winner of the 2025 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry for “Eggtooth” (Unbound Edition Press, 2023).

            Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas. He teaches in the English department at University of California, Berkeley, and his poems have appeared in the “New York Review of Books,” the “Paris Review, Poetry,” the “American Poetry Review,” “The Nation” and “The Believer,” among others. “Eggtooth,” his debut collection, has also been recognized with the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry and the 2024 Housatonic Book Award.

            Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award judge Michael Kleber-Diggs, who won the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in 2022 for his poetry collection “Worldly Things,” wrote:

            “’Eggtooth’ by Jesse Nathan is a rich, musical, stunning collection that simultaneously feels deeply rooted in ancient practices and wholly new. In poems that are situated in rural Kansas and northern California, Nathan is, by turn, plain spoken and incantatory, earthen and artful. His confident and original voice arises from an extraordinary gift for attention, recall and presence, presence both in the captivating moments that inspire the poet and in the moments when he sculpted those memories into verse. Tremendous care was required both in the observation and in the telling, and that care is evident throughout. ‘Eggtooth’ never stopped surprising me with its new ways of seeing and thinking about people and places I long ago claimed as familiar.”

            From what he described as an “absolutely stacked” field of finalists, Kleber-Diggs selected three books for honorable mention: “Love Prodigal” (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), by Traci Brimhall, “Insomnia in Another Town” (Clemson University Press, 2024), by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson and “The Lights” (FSG, 2023), by Ben Lerner.

            The Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award alternates between genres (the 2026 award will be for Fiction, 2027 for Literary Nonfiction, and 2028 for Poetry). This award is sponsored by the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at the Washburn University Libraries and the Friends of University Libraries.

            This year’s award ceremony will be held at 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025, at the Plass Learning Resources Center (1731 Plass Ave.), Room 120. This free event will help kick off the 14^th annual Kansas Book Festival, which will take place Saturday, Sept. 20, on the Washburn University campus.  

            For more information about the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award, please visit: washburn.edu/library/ksbookaward

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