Poet Latif Askia Ba has won the Poetry category at the 2026 Firecracker Awards for his collection The Choreic Period: Poems, published by Milkweed Editions. The winners of the annual awards, presented by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), were announced during a virtual ceremony on June 25.
In announcing the award, the judges described The Choreic Period as:
“a striking contribution to contemporary disability poetics, challenging ableist reading habits and expanding what poetic accessibility and difficulty can mean. We were moved by its pared-down nature, its illustration of the relationship between syntax and disability, and its innovative formal elements, including interruptive punctuation, staccato lineation, multilingual code-switching, and deliberate difficulty. Its force and voice made this conceptually sharp, powerfully embodied book a clear choice for the Firecracker Poetry Award.”
Ba, a poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy from Brooklyn, New York, is the author of The Choreic Period: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2025) and The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon (Stillhouse Press, 2002). His work has appeared in Poetry magazine and numerous other publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and previously served as print poetry editor for the Columbia Journal‘s sixty-first issue.
Congratulations, Latif Askia Ba!
