Naomi Shihab Nye has won the $100,000 2024 Wallace Stevens Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and honoring "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."
Evie Shockley has won the 2024 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes "distinguished poetic achievement" and includes a stipend of $25,000 and a residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Mass.
Ricardo Maldonado, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets, called Nye and Shockley "two major voices who have made a space for the extraordinary possibility of poetry as a register of observation and reflection, compassion and togetherness, justice and grace."
Academy chancellor Afaa Michael Weaver said Nye: "In a stunning spectrum of works published in a period beginning nearly 50 years ago, Naomi Shihab Nye has borne witness to the complexities of cultural difference that connect us as human beings, evidencing a firm commitment to the poet as bearer of light and hope. In celebrating her Palestinian heritage with a gentle but unflinching commitment, her body of work is a rare and precious living entity in our time, when the tragic conflict between Gaza and Israel threatens to deepen wounds and resentments everywhere. Rooted in the profound influence of her family's love of their culture, Nye's commitment to hope establishes her as one of the most important poet ambassadors in our time, extending as she does the image of the American literary artist as global citizen. In supporting civility in all spaces, she echoes the concerns of William Stafford, an important influence. What her work would have us know, namely that only peace brings lasting peace, is what her grandmother and elders taught her as a child, the ubiquitous power of the beauty of simple things, the necessities of life that we must share if we are to endure."
Academy chancellor Ed Roberson said that "Evie Shockley's 'wine-dark sea,' unlike Homer's, is 'a half-red sea permanently parted, the middle she'd pass through, like the rest.' What she would bring through, out of that passage, is an astonishing achievement of poetry in the English language. In her poetry, she uses the persons of history in the way that other writers and landscape painters use the colors of the light on things to create space and time. In an early poem, 'London Bridge,' it isn't the expected children's rhyme, but the sound of a Negro spiritual sung by an English cathedral choir--its 'blues estuary... de-negroes de notes'--that wash into the Thames, floating the singing head of the baritone, Paul Robeson. Fallen into this river also are Othello, Elizabeth I, Gladstone, Disraeli, and Churchill. Shockley here has rewritten the textbook on mythological and historical poetic allusions, among her other innovations in American poetry. In her biographical and genealogical poems, the identity which is writing itself into existence does not have to fabricate a simulacrum of the immensity of its pain or achievement, no need for virtuosic figures of speech. Her figures speak for themselves and more; she makes these identities larger than both history and our individual selfies, and makes them speak for the total of us."