Read the winning Poem of the 2026 PUMA!

I pushed it to the limit a lot of the time. I have never been the type to recast things in an ominous light. I wanted to keep that [feeling] in the book—that we can ignore things and still feel the pressures of it.

I don’t necessarily think of the poem as being imposing. I write in the tradition of courage.

Zehra Naqvi’s debut collection The Knot of My Tongue explores personal and generational calamities: domestic violence, a family’s displacement during the Partition, the Battle of Karbala. Writing about or within unspeakable violence is no simple task for a poet.

Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction collects fourteen stories by new and established writers from the Palestinian diaspora. Edited by Sonia Sulaiman, these stories imagine new worlds and confront the reality of our own. Individually, these stories are thought-provoking and sincere. Together, they beautifully explore Palestinian identity and resistance, and offer readers a chance to reflect upon the present moment and what we want the future to look like.

The Coin follows a wealthy Palestinian woman who takes on a position as a teacher at an all-boys school in New York City. She is tastefully extravagant, chaotically in crisis, not a particularly good or moral person, and one of the most fascinating characters to emerge in contemporary fiction.