MSU creative writing faculty member earns national recognition from PEN America
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Samyak Shertok, a Mississippi State assistant professor of English, is a finalist for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award for his debut poetry collection “No Rhododendron,” published in 2025 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
The award from PEN America honors an exceptional book-length work by an author of color. It includes a $10,000 prize and an artist residency. The winner will be announced next month.
“No Rhododendron,” which also won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, is a collection that explores exile, the Nepalese Maoist conflict and the fading Tamang language. Through his poetry, Shertok reflects on loss, the impact of civil war in Nepal and what it means to cling to language and identity.
“For a boy who was born in a Himalayan village and did not start learning English properly until grade four, this recognition feels like a dream,” Shertok said. “And especially so because this book bears witness to my disappearing oral mother tongue, Tamang, and the scars of the decade-long Maoist conflict on the consciousness of the Nepali schoolchildren. These are deeply personal and local themes that may not readily resonate with the western audience. I’m very grateful to the judges and PEN America for seeing this book and for this incredible honor.”
Lara Dodds, professor and head of MSU’s Department of English, said she and her colleagues are fortunate to have welcomed Shertok to the university last year.
“He is a dynamic and engaging teacher because he is such a committed poet, which is evident in the nomination of ‘No Rhododendron’ for this prestigious prize. His poetry is personal and moving, and he uses language in a way that gives readers a new perspective on the topics he writes about: family, his home country of Nepal and the difficulty of representing loss and grief.”
Shertok has published poems in The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Best New Poets and other leading journals. His honors include the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry and Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
He was the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University and teaches creative writing at MSU.
PEN International is the world’s largest nonprofit association of writers with more than 100 centers worldwide. It was founded in 1921 to promote literature, friendship and freedom of expression, with PEN America as its largest center.
For more information about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English, visit www.cas.msstate.edu and www.english.msstate.edu.
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