M (Maia) Campbell of Worcester, Massachusetts, has won the 2026 Frank O’Hara Prize. The O’Hara Prize, awarded annually by the Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA), was established in 1973. Campbell’s poem “apologia poetica” was selected by contest judge January Gill O’Neil from the 197 submissions by 75 entrants.
M (Maia) Campbell is a Jamaican-American poet. She has been a Brooklyn Poets fellow, and, in 2025, she won second place in the Frank O’Hara Prize Contest with the poem “When I Grow Up.” You can find published poems in Amistad, The Ana, Three Decker, and forthcoming in The Worcester Review. You can keep up with M at https://poeticallyexpressedthoughts.wordpress.com/.
Two additional winners were selected by January Gill O’Neil
- Second Place – Dr. Huili Zheng of Rutland, Massachusetts, for “Legoland at Night”
- Third Place – Michael Milligan of Worcester, Massachusetts, for “Among the Trees”
The winning poems will be published in the next edition of The Worcester Review, the nationally recognized journal of the WCPA. The winners also receive a cash award.
The WCPA will invite all the winners to read their work at the Winners’ Ceremony and Reading on Sunday, September 27, 2026, at 4:00 p.m.
The Winners’ Reading will be held at the WCPA Board Room 61 Harvard St. Worcester. Contest judge January Gill O’Neil will be our featured reader that afternoon.
Dr. Huili Zheng is an Associate Teaching Professor of Chinese language and literature at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese literature from Nanjing University and a doctoral degree from the University of California, Irvine. Her
scholarly monograph, Beyond Sinocentrism: Ethnocultural Other in Early Modern China, was published by Cambria Press in 2025. She also translated Professor Michael Fuller’s Drifting among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History into Chinese. Her creative writing explores themes of migration, memory, and cultural identity. She lives in Rutland, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and their golden retriever.
Michael Milligan has worked as a construction laborer, migrant fruit and grape picker, homestead farmer and graphic arts production manager. Also a musician/composer, artist and writer. He took his MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College (thereby joining
the teeming mass of writers with degrees of dubious cachet), co-founded Poetry Oasis Worcester and was privileged to be an editor with Diner. His poetry book reviews, fiction and poems have appeared in Agni, Diner, The New Orleans Review, The Valparaiso
Review, Chaffin Journal, Blue Earth Review, Illuminations and others. He is the author of Unless I Came Back to Tell You, Kelsay Books 2021 and Failure of Flight, ICOE Press, 2026.
January Gill O’Neil is the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Rewilding was a finalist for the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize and was recognized by Mass Center for the Book as a notable poetry collection for 2018. From 2012 to 2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, O’Neil’s poems and articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and Ecotone, among others. In 2018, O’Neil was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. O’Neil is an associate professor of English at Salem State University, a board of trustees member with Montserrat College, and the chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs board of directors. O’Neil lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.
