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The Distance That Isn’t Miles: Our 2026 POPP Award Winner

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Every year, we host our annual Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award competition. In 2026, we are pleased to announce that Anthony J. Albright is our winning author. This fall, we will letterpress publish Tony’s chapbook-length poetry collection, The Distance That Isn’t Miles, as our 11th chapbook in the series.

Tony will receive nationally distributed publication, ten comp copies, $400 ($200 at the signing of his contract + $200 when he serves as next year’s finalist judge), and our author’s discount.

Tony is a Choctaw writer, army veteran, and scholar whose work traces memory, landscape, and recovery across the Plains. His poetry and prose appear in North Dakota Quarterly, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Issued: Stories of Service. He holds a PhD in Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture from North Dakota State University.

 

Our POPP Award competition is conducted with double blind peer review. This year we had ten in-house readers and two finalist judges. Usually, we have just one finalist judge, but co-authors won last year, so Tony received double-good powerful praise. 😊 We’ve included both of the finalist judges’ comments below, and we’ve changed the pronouns they used for the narrator–since they did not know the author’s identity–to Tony’s name. The finalist judges are Josh Gaines and Ben Clark, co-authors of After the Floating Barn and other fine works of poetry and prose.


From Josh: 

Ish haklo ho? The Distance That Isn’t Miles is a military journey through narrative poems that carried me through places I am familiar with as a veteran, but unfamiliar with as a non-Native American. This book creates a new lens, changing the view of common experiences into the uncommon, the spiritual, and even the magical. Tony Albright writes, “I feel the land daring me to rise. I whisper holisso, book-spirit, teach me how to read this place before it reads me first,” while at the same time this book is teaching me how to read it, how to experience. Words give dimension to thought, and so with new words I learn a new way to think. This holisso reminds me of the things I value, of promises I’ve made, and of lives I gave up before I could even name the one I was already living.
“Every mile feels borrowed from another life,” writes Albright. And whose life or lives we are living, our own, our ancestors, our government’s? The narrator begins with putting his life in the hands of the military with a signature, and the military does what it does and accepts the offer. Nothing can be the same past this moment. The world grows smaller as it is crossed. There is training, gas to breathe, wars to witness and bear the scars of, while the narrator clings to vanished versions of themselves. T.S. Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Distance That Isn’t Miles says, maybe not. It asks, what happens if we can never truly arrive where we started because part of us can never leave where we’ve been. It asks, what if home is only a thing one can leave.

 

From Ben:

I was pulled into the journey of The Distance That Isn’t Miles and the effortless way the poems worked together in a uniform, chronological narrative, while also standing alone as individual pieces. What a great use of the chapbook format. And what wonderful language: descriptive, understated, emotive, and masterfully paced: “Her fingers are small storms,” “windows rattling like restless bones,” “humming hvshi hvshi / under my breath, the syllables slipping / like sparks between whistling teeth,” and “Dawn here is a blade: sharp, sudden, / cutting the night from the day with no apology.”
This is a narrator that is stripped of everything, remade, but is also resilient enough, thankfully, to keep hold of his language, which he uses like a prayer, a shield, a song passed down through generations. This language is the road, if not back to who they were before the military, then to the version of themselves that “can fall— / not metaphorically, / but literally, repeatedly, / with something like grace.” Repeatedly, the key word in this poem, as it implies rising from the fall with something like grace as well.

 

Past POPP Award Publications:

Next year’s POPP Award submissions period will be open (as usual) from January 17 through March 17. Poets, please mark your calendar! Submissions can be uploaded here when the portal opens: NDSU Press Submission Manager.

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