The Academy of American Poets announced the 2023 winners of its annual poetry prizes. This year's recipients are:
Afaa Michael Weaver won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award, which recognizes "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry." Academy chancellor Kwame Dawes said, "For over three decades, Afaa Michael Weaver has quietly and without fanfare put together a tremendous body of work that has allowed us to see the America of the last half century in all its upheavals and transformations as it contends with the meaning of freedom and justice. He combines his rootedness in the African American poetic with a fierce commitment to the idea of belonging despite America's long history of willfully deferring the dream of liberty, to, in effect, compel the nation to expand its understanding of itself and to embrace a more capacious sense of its constitution. And in so doing, Weaver has achieved something that only a few poets, most notably Joseph Millard and Philip Levine, have in the last few decades, which is to engage the idea of a working-class sensibility, not as a limitation, but as an opportunity to create art of depth, sophistication, and spiritual power. Afaa Michael Weaver is a major and necessary American voice."
Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe (Milkweed Press) won the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, awarded to "the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year."
Watchnight by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (Nightboat Books, 2024) won the $5,000 James Laughlin Award, given to "recognize and support a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year."
Ojo en Celo/Eye in Heat by Margarita Pintado Burgos, translated by Alejandra Quintana Arocho, won the Ambroggio Prize for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winners receive $1,000 and publication by the University of Arizona Press.
Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics) won the $1,000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, which recognizes a "published translation of poetry from any language into English that demonstrates literary excellence."
Moira Egan's translation of Letters of Black Fire by Italian poet Giorgiomaria Cornelio won the $25,000 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize for "the outstanding translation into English of a significant work of modern Italian poetry."
Major Jackson received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes "distinguished poetic achievement," and includes a $25,000 stipend as well as a residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Mass.
Edgar Morales won the $1,000 Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award.