[Many thanks to Tess O’Dwyer for bringing this item to our attention.] The Academy of American Poets has awarded the 2026 Ambroggio Prize to La única cosa importante / The Only Thing that Matters, a poetry collection by Amanda Hernández and translated by Ana Portnoy Brimmer.

Selected by poet and translator Aaron Coleman, the prize recognizes a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and translated into English. The manuscript will be published in 2027 by The University of Arizona Press.

Hernández’s manuscript follows the movement of people, language, and memory across the Caribbean and into the United States, exploring questions of #community, #kinship, and colonial history. Through intimate lyric poems shaped by science, landscape, and personal history, La única cosa importante / The Only Thing that Matters reflects the complexity of contemporary Puerto Rican experience while expanding the possibilities of bilingual poetry in the United States.

Prize judge Aaron Coleman praised the collection’s “wild imagination fueling the courageous vulnerability and self-reflective voice of ‘The Only Thing that Matters,’” adding that it “dwells in the complexities of connection, the (unending) aftermaths of (neo)colonialism and how it has tried to scatter so many of us.” He also wrote, “This translation is ambitious, vivid, swirling with competing energies.”

Amanda Hernández is a Puerto Rican poet and editor. She has a BA in literature and an MA in cultural management, both from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus. Her work has been mostly self-published in author’s editions. 

Hernández’s poetry collections include La única cosa importante / The Only Thing that Matters (University of Arizona Press, 2027), translated by Ana Portnoy Brimmer and the winner of the 2026 Ambroggio Prize; La distancia es un lugar (La Impresora, 2020); Estrategias atómicas (La Impresora, 2018); and Entre tanto amarillo (La Impresora, 2016). Her work has also appeared in a couple of anthologies, including Bioversa: antología de poesía científica puertorriqueña (Gnomo Editorial, 2024), edited by Mónica Lladó-Ortega and Eiric Durandal-Stormcrow.

In 2023, Hernández’s first poetry book translated into English by the poet Kenneth Cumba was published by Editorial Pulpo in a bilingual edition titled Entre tanto amarillo / Yellow Struck. That same year, her poem “Arquitecta,” from Estrategias atómicas, was commissioned by the Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón for an original piece with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, interpreted by the Colombian singer Lido Pimienta. In 2025, Hernández’s poetry was once again commissioned by Negrón, this time as part of her concert Recovecos with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra Green Umbrella Series.

In 2021, Hernández was named an inaugural Letras Boricuas Fellow by Flamboyán and the Mellon Foundation. She is a codirector of La Impresora, an independent poetry press and risograph printing studio that specializes in publishing contemporary Caribbean and Latin American poetry.

Hernández lives in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. 

Ana Portnoy Brimmer, the daughter of Mexican-Jewish parents, is a poet, translator, impact producer, and organizer from Puerto Rico. She holds a BA and an MA in English literature from the University of Puerto Rico and is an alumna of the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University–Newark. 

To Love an Island (2021), Portnoy Brimmer’s poetry debut, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Que tiemble (2023), a derivative work of poetry in Spanish, was published with La Impresora; and Aimer une île (2025), a translation of Que tiemble into French by Benjamin Haroun Montesano, was published with Editorial Pulpo. She is the translator of La única cosa importante / The Only Thing that Matters by Amanda Hernández, winner of the 2026 Ambroggio Prize.

Portnoy Brimmer is a 2025 Letras Boricuas Fellow and 2024 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence Program alumna, she was awarded a 2023 MASS MoCA fellowship for artists from Puerto Rico, and was named one of Poets & Writers’ 2021 Debut Poets. Her work has been anthologized in Disparate Kind: Neurodivergent Poets Chapbook, Vol. 1 (University of California Santa Barbara, 2025); Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (Library of America, 2024), edited by Rigoberto González; and Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019), edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón. 

Portnoy Brimmer resides in Puerto Rico.

For more information, see https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/ambroggio-prize

[Photo credits: Amanda Hernández by Joelly Rodríguez. Portnoy Brimmer by Alberto Bartolomei.]