New York, NY (October 10, 2024)—The Academy of American Poets announces the recipients of this year’s Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award, Teja Sudhakar, a student at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as the winners of the University & College Poetry Prizes, part of the Academy’s annual suite of literary prizes honoring the work of poets at all stages of their careers.
“Connecting emerging voices with broader communities has been at the heart of the Academy’s work since day one,” said Ricardo Maldonado, President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. “The poets and poems being recognized with university and college prizes and the Aliki Perroti And Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award are further proof of poetry’s ability to usher in clarity and precision, inviting us to see the world in ways we have never seen before. We celebrate these young poets and poetry’s evolving and nourishing landscape.”
Established in 1955, the University & College Poetry Prizes program began with ten schools. Since then, the Academy of American Poets has continued to recognize the exceptional work of emerging poets by awarding cash prizes to nearly ten thousand student poets at over two hundred colleges and universities across the United States. Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Kimiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Li-Young Lee, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Mary Jo Salter, Mark Strand, Ocean Vuong, and Charles Wright are just a few university and college prize winners who have gone on to become leading voices of their generations through their visionary words and contributions to literary communities. Prizes are independently administered by university and college English and writing departments participating in the program, which is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.
The Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award, which was established in 2013, recognizes a student poet twenty-three years old or younger with a cash prize of $1,000 and publication on Poets.org. Current winners of the University & College Poetry Prizes were considered. Academy Chancellor and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey judged.
ABOUT TEJA SUDHAKAR, WINNER OF THE MOST PROMISING YOUNG POET AWARD
Interdisciplinary artist Teja Sudhakar was born in Chennai, India, and spent the majority of their life in Lexington, Kentucky. They are an MFA candidate at Indiana University. Sudhakar’s work explores queer and immigrant narratives from the Transnational South. Their chapbook Looking for Smoke is a collection of docupoetry entailing the experiences of five first-generation immigrant women living in Kentucky. In both their poetry and darkroom photography, Sudhakar asks questions about silence, the loss of one’s first language, intergenerational womanhood, tenderness, and memory. Sudhakar’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, Frontier Poetry, and other publications. They currently live in Bloomington, Indiana.
About their poem “TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW / ABOUT DISMEMBERMENT,” Chancellor Natasha Trethewey writes: “At the heart of this arresting poem is a meditation rooted in loss wherein language is both the site of it and also a site of reclamation: the possibility of the language of poetry to embody an experience of grief and estrangement from one’s culture. The poem unfolds as a list, a story unraveled in fragments delineated by the symbol for line breaks. In this way, the poem visually and sonically echoes the kind of fragmentation wrought by grief and by an inability to speak a language to which one is tethered: ‘this language / a tetherball / unwielding / language breaking,’ the poet writes. In this lovely poem, what might seem unwieldy—the places where language breaks down—is harnessed powerfully and I am left marveling at what can be grasped and conveyed despite the seeming limitations of our many and varied tongues.”
To read Sudhakar's poem, visit: https://poets.org/poem/tell-me-what-you-know-about-dismemberment.
To read poems by the 2024 winners of the University & College Poetry Prizes, visit: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/university-college-poet….
ABOUT THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
Celebrating its ninetieth anniversary in 2024, the Academy of American Poets is a leading publisher of contemporary poetry across the United States. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program. It also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to educators; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, including its staff, its Board of Directors, and its Board of Chancellors, visit https://poets.org/.