Vanderbilt University Literary Prize I Would Define the Sun

A poetic exploration of what love does across vast distances, whether of language and immigration, ecological ruin, or longing Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2026 Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at the end of the world. Recycling and folding language through duplexes, sestinas, and echoing couplets, this collection moves across great distances to include Christmas Island, Chinese-American immigration, and the precarity and abundance of the sea through formal and lyric poetry. Refitting the world into a size “made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue,” Niu propels readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.