Winner, 2027 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Rich with Black spirituality and familial memory, Heartless Architecture traverses Houston to interrogate how citizens can care for each other in a city that perpetually does them harm. As a third-generation Texan, former mutual aid organizer, and wavering church kid, Aris Kian renders a Southern pastoral underpinned by the heartbreak of historical violence, gentrification, and systemic indifference: “The day S was buried, another bridge / was built over 59 almost overnight. . . . / When G bit a prayer / into the blacktop, downtown erected a skyline / unrecognizable to a practiced eye. . . . A midtown park springs out of the grass / as two rounds are fired into A’s chest. / Sometimes, growth is mistaken / for healing.”

A keen observer of the contested landscapes that comprise both self and home, and eager to elicit new meanings from myths that are “the residue of a history interrupted,” Kian is at her most triumphant when she unites with her fellow citizens to combat state harm: “I do know our resistance is stronger / than any brick or barricade / they could tear down and toss out. / I do know our commitment to principle / cannot be cut through.” 

Aris Kian’s poems have been published in Obsidian Lit, Huizache, Button Poetry, and elsewhere. As an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of Houston. She was a 2025 Lilly-Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow and the 2023–25 Houston Poet Laureate.