2023 Bollingen Prize Judges

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

2021 Bollingen Prize winner Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Hello, the Roses; Empathy; I Love Artists; and A Treatise on Stars. Her collaborations include works in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts.  She is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and has received the PEN Open Book Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, American Book Awards, Asian American Writer’s Workshop Awards, and a PEN West award. She lives in northern New Mexico and in New York City.

Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award and the Forward Prize in Poetry, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), winner of an American Book Award. She has received fellowships from The MacArthur Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the Native Arts Council Foundation, and Princeton University. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. A language activist, Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she teaches in the MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) – a NYT Notable Book in 2019 – and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press); he is a co-editor and co-translated of many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books). Kaminaky has been awarded The Los Angeles Times Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize; his books have been nominated for the National Book Award, National Book Critics