Poet of Muskogee Creek heritage wins Wallace Stevens award from the Academy of American Poets for ‘proven mastery’

Joy Harjo: known for wedding social consciousness to her Muskogee Creek heritage and the south-west American landscape. (courtesy photo)

Poet Joy Harjo, known for wedding social consciousness to her Muskogee Creek heritage and the south-west American landscape, has won a $100,000 prize for lifetime achievement.

Harjo, 64, received the Wallace Stevens award for “proven mastery”, the Academy of American Poets announced on Thursday. The academy praised Harjo for her “visionary justice-seeking art” and for transforming “bitterness to beauty” and “trauma to healing”.

Her books include How We Became Human and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.

Previous winners of the Stevens prize include WS Merwin and Adrienne Rich.

Also on Thursday, the academy awarded Kevin Young’s Book of Hours the $25,000 Lenore Marshall poetry prize, for the year’s best collection, and a $25,000 fellowship to poet Marie Howe.

Kathryn Nuernberger’s The End of Pink won a $1,000 prize for the best second book of poetry, and Blake N Campbell received a $1,000 award for student poetry for his work Bioluminescence.

The academy announced two translation awards. Todd Portnowitz received a $25,000 prize and five-week residency at the American Academy in Rome for his work on Italian poet Pierluigi Cappello’s Go Tell It to the Emperor. Roger Greenwald’s English-language edition of the Swedish poet Gunnar Harding’s Guarding the Air brought him a $1,000 prize.

The nonprofit academy was founded in 1934.

The Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry.
http://www.poets.org