Nathaniel Mackey Wins 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Posted on May 6, 2014

Nathaniel Mackey has won the 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The annual prize honors a living U.S. poet for outstanding lifetime achievement. It carries a $100,000 cash prize. The prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, which publishes Poetry magazine. The prize was established in 1986.

Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. Some of his books and poetry collections include Splay Anthem, Eroding Witness, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Septet for the End of Time, Bass Cathedral and Outlandish. His most recent publication is the chapbook Outer Pradesh. Mackey won the 2006 National Book Award in the Poetry category for Splay Anthem.

Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, says in the announcement, "The poetry of Nathaniel Mackey continues an American bardic line that unfolds from Whitman's Leaves of Grass to H.D.'s Trilogy to Olson's Maximus poems, winds through the whole of Robert Duncan's work and extends beyond all of these. In his poems, but also in his genre-defying serial novel (which has no beginning or end) and in his multifaceted critical writing, Mackey's words always go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment."

A new interview with Nathaniel Mackey has been published by the Poetry Foundation.