prize time

The Poetry Foundation has just announced the winners of the 2022 Pegasus Awards, a family of literary prizes that include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

In recognition of Poetry magazine’s 110th anniversary, the Poetry Foundation has decided to award 10 additional Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes this year, resulting in $1,132,500 in prizes distributed to the 2022 winners. It is the greatest prize amount that the Foundation has ever awarded to a cohort of living poets at one time. The 11 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winners are: Sandra Cisneros, CAConrad, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Juan Felipe Herrera, Angela Jackson, Haki Madhubuti, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Patti Smith, and Arthur Sze.

The Poetry Foundation has also chosen Elizabeth Acevedo, the bestselling author of The Poet X, to serve as the 2022–2024 Young People’s Poet Laureate, and awarded The Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism to Kevin Quashie for his book Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, which draws on Black feminist literary texts, including work by poets Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan.

Washington State Book Awards finalists!

The Washington Center for the Book and The Seattle Public Library have just announced 39 finalists in eight categories for the 2022 Washington State Book Awards (WSBA) for outstanding books published by Washington authors in 2021.

In poetry, the finalists are

• Broken by Water: Salish Sea Years (Turning Point) by Gary Thompson
• Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press) by Kelli Russell Agodon
• More American (Grid Books / Off the Grid Press) by Sharon Hashimoto
• Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (Milkweed Editions) by Kathryn Smith
• Stray Birds (Kelson Books) by Andrew Robin

Congratulations, poets!

See the complete list of 2022 finalists as well as winners and finalists from previous years, and stay tuned for the 2022 winners, to be announced on Tuesday, September 13, 2022.

Submissions are now being accepted for the 2023 book awards, for books published in 2022.

Pulitzer!

The 2022 Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week and Diane Seuss is the winner in poetry for her much-lauded book, frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press), “a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt.”

We congratulate Diane Seuss, and the two finalists in poetry, Will Alexander for Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten (New Directions) and Mai Der Vang for Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press), and to Graywolf Press for claiming two spots among the top three.

See the complete list of 2022 Pulitzer Prizes.

poetry from Canada

The League of Canadian Poets has just posted the 2022 Book Awards longlists. There are three awards: the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award award recognizes a first book of poetry published by a Canadian writer in the preceding year; the Pat Lowther Memorial Award recognizes a book of poetry published by a Canadian woman in the preceding year; and the Raymond Souster Award recognizes a book of poetry by a League member published in the preceding year. See the complete list of titles here.

more awards

The MacArthur Foundation has just announced the slate of 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2021. The Foundation awards “unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Known colloquially as “genius” grants, the awards recognize exceptional vision in a variety of fields. Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000 to the recipient, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.

Among this year’s fellows are poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Don Mee Choi.

awards season

A few days ago, we mentioned the Washington State Book Awards, and that Patricia Smith had been awarded the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize. Smith’s award is dazzling, and we should also note the Academy of American Poets prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, which went to Toi Derricotte, the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, the National Book Foundation’s 2021 National Book Awards Longlist for Poetry, and poet Patricia Lockwood, whose debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, has been shortlisted for both the 2021 Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Congratulations finalists and winners!

Poetry prizes are announced throughout the year. Finalists for the UK’s T.S. Eliot Prize and Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards will be announced in mid-October.

what a list!

PEN America has announced the finalists for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards, and what a list it is!

To make their decisions, the judges narrowed down 1850+ submissions to 55 books, spanning 11 awards in the categories of science writing, the essay, poetry and short story collections, translation, the novel, and more. Twenty of the books featured are from writers making their literary debuts. Half of the open-genre award finalists are poetry collections.

The winners will be celebrated at the PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony, to take place virtually on Thursday, April 8, 2021, and will be open to a global audience. (Details TBA.)

meanwhile, across the border

Thirty-two writers from across Canada have been longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. The shortlist will be announced tomorrow, November 5, 2020, and the winner will be announced on November 12. Learn more about the poets and their poems on the CBC Literary Prizes page.

Congratulations, poets!

awards season

The Poetry Society of America has announced the winners of the 2020 Annual Awards. See the complete list of winners and finalists and read sample poems here. You can also see and hear a number of the winners reading their work with the links provided below (but not on the PSA website):

Atsuro Riley is the winner of the 2020 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress. Atsuro Riley reads “Oak”

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the winner of the 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award for a selection of poems by a mid-career poet. Teri Ellen Cross Davis reads “The Goddess of Cleaning”

Michael Dumanis is the winner of the 2020 Lyric Poetry Award. Michael Dumanis reads “The Empire of Light”

JinJin Xu is the winner of the 2020 George Bogin Memorial Award for a selection of poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms. JinJin Xu reads from “To Red Dust (II)”

David Keplinger is the winner of the 2020 Emily Dickinson Award for a poem inspired by Emily Dickinson’s work. David Keplinger reads “Reading Emily Dickinson in Amherst Massachusetts”

Dai “Debby” Shi is the winner of the 2020 Student Poetry Award. Dai “Debby” Shi reading “It’s Too Early”

Pulitzers

Pulitzer Administrator Dana Canedy has just announced the 2020 Pulitzer Prizes.

The finalists in poetry are:
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Only As the Day Is Long by Dorianne Laux
Dunce by Mary Ruefle

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry has been awarded to Jericho Brown. Congratulations!

Watch the video of the announcement and read the full list of winners on the Pulitzer site.