Claudia Rankine Wins 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize

Posted on April 25, 2014

Poets & Writers has announced that Claudia Rankine is the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize. The award carries a $50,000 cash prize and is given annually to an American poet of exception talent. Ms. Rankine is the eight winner of the prize.

Ms. Rankine's poetry collection include Don't Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf Press, 2004), Plot (Grove Press, 2001), The End of the Alphabet (Grove Press, 1998), and Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Press, 1994). She will publish a new collection, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf), on October 7, 2014.

This year's panel of judges included poets Tracy K. Smith, David St. John, and Mark Strand. The judges say the moral vision of Rankine's poetry is astounding.

They panel of judges says, "Rankine's poems also foster a quite nearly cinematic sense of suspense, striking notes of urgency, anxiety, and momentous inevitability. In particular, the collections Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen: An American Lyric invite the reader to empathize with the social 'other,' with victims of violent aggression committed in hatred and ignorance, and with speakers subject to a more generalized American malaise."

You can find a list of past winners of the Jackson Poetry Prize here.