Jorie Graham Wins the 2017 Wallace Stevens Award
Posted on September 2, 2017
Jorie Graham has won the 2017 Wallace Stevens Award. The annual award carries a stipend of $100,000. It was established in 1994. It is one of the American Poets Prizes awarded by the Academy of American Poets.
Graham is the author of multiple poetry collections. She won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (Ecco, 1997). Her latest collection, Fast: Poems, was published by Ecco earlier this year. Her other collections include Place: New Poems, Swarm, Sea Change, Never and From the New World: Poems 1976-2014.
Academy of American Poets Chancellor Claudia Rankine says of Graham in the announcement, "Jorie Graham's masterful poems traverse almost four decades of inquiry into what it means to be in relation. Her work pulls forward our mythical, historical, environmental, and personal narratives in order to inhabit our most ordinary and collective experiences. Hers is the patience of the return; repetition in her work unearths the nuances of fundamental desires to live, to love, to be. Clear-eyed and with a scope that encompasses what is both known and unknown, her fifteen collections have built towards a brilliant insistence on presence."
You can find more about the American Poets Prizes on poets.org. Here is a list of the winners of the other prizes this year:
- Ed Roberson received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
- Patrick Rosal's book Brooklyn Antediluvian received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
- Sam Sax's book Bury It won the James Laughlin Award
- Pitor Florczyk's Building the Barricade by Anna Swirszczynska won the Harold Morton London Translation Award
- Thomas E. Peterson's translation of the work of Italian poet Franco Fortini won the Raiziss/De Palchi Fellowship
- Frances Revel won the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award for her poem "Hymn for the End of Drought."