Winner of the 2026 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Victoria Chang, forthcoming November 2026

Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike.

“The poems in Dancing with Poets do that—they dance, rhythmically, as they swirl through, around, and within their narratives. These incantatory poems draw you in as they fuse the speaker’s voice with the reader’s imagination. The comma, the em dash, and the line break enact the drama so that what we have transcends the speaker, transcends the drama, and transcends the many elegized in these poems. ‘Forgive me. We hold on to what / we can, & then we lose it anyway, // because such music cannot last—,’ the poet writes in the stunning opening poem, ‘Swannanoa: Swirl & Vortex,’ yet what’s left on these pages sings and sings . . .”                                 —Victoria Chang, final judge

“The poems in Dancing with Poets demonstrate a musician’s ear, the careful and demanding accuracy to sound and rhythm, but more importantly, they capture the music of thought (“the boy in bed // who dreams of soaring, / the bike that beckons him to fly”). In Turchi’s debut, the restlessness of thought, the willingness to relay thought whether panicked or deliciously languid, is truly  admirable. Even fatigue is captured in all of its elegance: “tired no sleep barely / conscious tired bone / tired body worn slow / tired dumb slow steroid / wearing off bone / tired tired to the bone.” Dancing with Poets signals the arrival of a beautifully powerful new voice.”         —C. Dale Young

“While Reed Turchi’s accomplished first book, Dancing with Poets, pays homage—a tango of influence?—to Larry Levis and Ellen Bryant Voigt, what his clear-eyed poems achieve with a freshness and brilliance all their own, is a unique, wry, sad and joyous, richly detailed vision of the contemporary world, a world that’s ‘blinding and familiar,’ governed by the centripetal force of memory that returns us to the ‘lives we can’t escape’ as we search for our lost homes and ‘[those] we love . . . & [those] we leave behind.’” —Michael Collier 

“From its first great long poem inspired by Larry Levis, Dancing with Poets announces the arrival of a voice both new and indebted to history, a poetry that ranges from musical swagger to a rollicking storyteller mode to something more elegiac, suffused with the sadness of wisdom—as though knowledge gained must always be balanced by some other loss. Turchi’s poems are joyful and tearful, asking ‘new-world questions about living among ruins’ and offering the memento mori function of a skull in the studio: ‘You have to dim your life to hear this kind of music. . . . ’  This life is ‘time from one note stolen & given to another.’” —Elisa Gabbert 

“An amazing book. Reed Turchi is a music-maker and a storyteller of the highest order. A searing voice, restless, moving, and strange in the best ways. I’m shaken by it, and high from reading it.” —Jesse Nathan

“Reed Turchi’s poems weave image, lyric, and silence the way human existence weaves living, loving, and losing, and because of that, they reward careful reading and rereading and questioning and savoring and wondering. They model what the best poems always seem to contain at their centers: not an elucidation of mystery but the most attentive witnessing to our encounters with it. Dancing with Poets is a dazzlingly accomplished first book.” —Jennifer Grotz

Reed Turchi is a poet, musician, and producer from Swannanoa, North Carolina, now living in Brooklyn. He has won a GRAMMY Award and received an EMMY Nomination, and his poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Turchi earned his MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was awarded the Ellen Bryant Voigt Scholarship, and he has received support from Breadloaf Writers Conference, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.