Poet Arthur Sze has been awarded the 54th Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for his lifetime achievement in the field; the prize includes a cash award of $175,000. The inaugural Patricia Cannon Willis Prize has been awarded to poet Major Jackson for his book Razzle Dazzle; the Willis Prize includes a $25,000 cash prize.

The prizes were awarded by a panel of three judges: Joy Harjo, Sandra Lim, and Karin Roffman.

An announcement from Yale Library is online here: Yale Library awards 2 prizes honoring the highest achievement in American poetry | Yale Library.

About the Prizes

The Bollingen Prize has been awarded by Yale Library since 1950. Throughout its history, the Prize has recognized and honored the best in American poetry. Early Bollingen Prize winners — Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden — are today widely considered to be writers whose work defined a new American literature of the 20th century. More recent winners — John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Glück, Charles Wright, Gary Snyder, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Jean Valentine, Charles Bernstein, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge — have been praised for bringing stylistic diversity to American writing.

The Patricia Cannon Willis Prize is a new honor associated with the Bollingen Prize. The Bollingen Prize has long been a hybrid of a lifetime achievement award and book prize – for decades the prize has been awarded to a senior poet worthy of a lifetime achievement award for a book published during the award period. This year, for the first time, reference to recent publication has been removed from the award criteria and the Bollingen Prize is officially awarded as a lifetime achievement honor. In formalizing the Bollingen as a lifetime achievement prize, the Beinecke Library added a new companion poetry book prize. The Patricia Cannon Willis Prize for American Poetry honors a book published in the award period written by an American poet at any point in their career. The Willis Prize is named for literary historian, scholar, and rare book and manuscript curator Patricia Cannon Willis.  

Hereafter, the Willis Prize will be awarded every two years, on the same schedule as the Bollingen Prize. Both winners will be selected by the same three-judge panel.

There’s a recent article about both prizes online here: Yale Library announces new literary prize for American poetry | Yale Library.

About the Winners

Bollingen Prize winner Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024) and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Two new books are forthcoming on April 1, 2025: his twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press). A recipient of the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Willis Prize winner Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems, The Absurd Man, Hoops and Leaving Saturn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts, Major has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review and host of the award-winning podcast The Slowdown.

About the Judges

Author of more than 10 books of poetry, as well as plays, children’s books, and memoirs, Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd poet laureate of the United States from 2019 to 2022. Harjo’s many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Harjo is the 2023 winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

Sandra Lim’s latest book of poetry is The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021). Her previous collections include The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). She is the recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, Pushcart Prizes, and the Levis Reading Prize. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at UMass Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Born in Seoul, Korea, she lives in Cambridge, MA.

Karin Roffman is the author of the first biography of John Ashbery, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), which was named one of the 100 notable books for 2017 by the New York Times.  She is currently at work on a full biography of John Ashbery; a biography of the American painter Jane Freilicher will follow.  In 2019, in collaboration with the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab, she released John Ashbery’s Nest, a virtual tour and website on John Ashbery’s Hudson house (see http://vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/). Her research has been supported by two ACLS fellowships (2011-12, 2017-18), the Howard Foundation (2011-12) and an NEH summer stipend (2009), as well as grants from the Houghton Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the American Philosophical Society. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010), on the poetry and prose of Edith Wharton, Marianne Moore, Nella Larsen and Ruth Benedict won the University of Alabama Press’s American Literature Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Prize and subsequent publication

photo of Arthur Sze by Sharlett Bravo; photo of Major Jackson by Beowulf Sheehan