Genre: Poetry

Today the Poetry Foundation named Marilyn Nelson the winner of the 2019 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The annual award for outstanding lifetime achievement is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets and includes a $100,000 prize. The Poetry Foundation also named Terrance Hayes the recipient of the 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and Naomi Shihab Nye the 2019–2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate. The three awards will be presented at the Pegasus Awards Ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on June 10.

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Poet and translator Marilyn Nelson has published several books, including three poetry collections that were finalists for the National Book Award: Carver: A Life in Poems (Front Street Press, 2001), The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), and The Homeplace (Louisiana State University Press, 1990). Nelson won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 2012 and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and was the state’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2006.

“Marilyn Nelson has been committed throughout her career to meticulously chronicling the contemporary and historical experience—and contributions—of Black people in America,” said Don Share, editor of the foundation’s magazine, Poetry. “Everyone who cares about how life is lived and felt in this country should read her vivid and deeply considered work.”

The inaugural Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize was awarded to Adrienne Rich in 1986. The prize has since been awarded to Gary Snyder, C. K. Williams, W. S. Merwin, Joy Harjo, and Martín Espada, among others.

The Young People’s Poet Laureate title, which includes a $25,000 prize, celebrates a living writer’s devotion to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. As the 2019–2021 laureate, Nye plans to bring poetry to geographically underserved areas. Nye, who is a professor of creative writing at Texas State University, has published several poetry collections for both young readers and adults. BOA Editions published her most recent collection for adults, The Tiny Journalist, last month.

The $7,500 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, which honors a book of poetry criticism published in the previous year, was awarded to Terrance Hayes for his book To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave Books, 2018). A professor at New York University, Hayes has been recognized with numerous awards, including a 2010 National Book Award for his poetry collection Lighthead (Penguin Books, 2010).

At a ceremony in New York City this afternoon, Dante Micheaux was named the winner of the second annual Four Quartets Prize. Micheaux, who won for his book-length poem, Circus (Indolent Books), will receive $20,000. The annual award is given for a unified and complete sequence of poems published during the previous year. Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Rosanna Warren judged.

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“How right that this poet’s first name should be Dante,” wrote the judges in their citation. “For his Circus is a Comedy: a savage comedy, lacerating dialects, fingering wounds, looking for loves right and wrong in the crevices of history and of humiliated bodies. And yet, and yet. His language exults, triumphs, and freely rummages in the treasuries of the Bible, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, Baraka, and Mahalia Jackson, taking what it needs, making it his sovereign own, a wrested blessing.”

Upon accepting the award, Micheaux thanked his grandmother, saying she “put the pen in my hand, put my hand in her hand, and taught me how to write.” Micheaux also thanked Michael Broder, his publisher at Indolent Books, a small press based in Brooklyn devoted to poetry that is “innovative, provocative, risky, and relevant.” Micheaux is the author of one previous collection, Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010), and has published poems in the American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poetry, PN Review, and Tongue, among others.

The finalists for the prize were Catherine Barnett for her poem sequence “Accursed Questions” from Human Hours (Graywolf Press) and Meredith Stricker for her chapbook anemochore (Newfound Press).

The Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation established the Four Quartets Prize two years ago to celebrate the poetic sequence and honor T. S. Eliot’s legacy. Danez Smith won the inaugural prize for their lyric sequence “summer, somewhere” from Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press).

“‘When you finish the book, you close the pages and let your mind wander to the first thing you remember—the most vivid moment, a feeling, a character, a phrase, or even something in your own life experience that resonated and has been resurfaced by the story,’” says Ben Please in “The Bookshop Band” by Dana Isokawa in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. The duo, comprised of Please and Beth Porter, composes and performs literary-themed music by a wide range of authors, oftentimes inspired by just one book. Try this exercise while composing a new poem: Select a book you read recently and let your mind’s wandering—and lingering on a word, phrase, or feeling—lead you to the starting point of a poem.