Fady Joudah has won the $100,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, which recognizes "an American poet of exceptional talent" and is sponsored by Poets & Writers and funded by the Liana Foundation.
Joudah is the author of six collections of poems, most recently […], published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. His other collections are The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008); Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013); Textu (Copper Canyon Press, 2014); Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (Milkweed Editions, 2018); and Tethered to Stars (Milkweed Editions, 2021). He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the coeditor and cofounder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Series and Prize. A winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007, Joudah has received a PEN USA Literary Award, a Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, Tex., where he practices internal medicine.
The judges commented: "The Jackson Poetry Prize celebrates Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah's significant and evolving body of work, distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable, in poems of lyric concision and intensity. 'I write for the future,' Joudah tells us, 'because my present is demolished.' From the epicenter of that devastation, Joudah resists via the potent image, the senses, and the network of feelings, conjuring the smile of a child rescued from a bombed-out home, and two siblings who liberate their fish 'from the rubble of airstrikes'--speaking of and from the 'collaterals' of war. Joudah's diction is slippery, elucidating the instability of language in bearing what cannot be borne. This slippage echoes, as well, the fragility of selfhood, and of love, in the face of such annihilation. He demands love poems from a world so adept at withholding love. The current historical moment gives Joudah's most recent poems particular urgency, though his body of work has consistently explored mortality, the poem's capacity to archive the living and the dead, and to transform borders into thresholds. Joudah's lyric gift generates a transcendence into unity, 'From womb / to breath, and one / with oneness // I be: / from the river / to the sea.' "
---
Finalists have been selected for the $10,000 Young Lions Fiction Award, honoring the work of American authors who write novels or short stories and are age 35 or younger. The award is sponsored by the New York Public Library; the winner will be named June 13.
The finalists:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah for Chain-Gang All-Stars
Monica Brashears for House of Cotton
Eskor David Johnson for Pay As You Go
E. J. Koh for The Liberators
C Pam Zhang for Land of Milk and Honey