New York, NY (June 13, 2024)—The Academy of American Poets, a leading champion of poets and poetry, is pleased to announce the 2024 winners of the Ambroggio Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. These two signature prizes administered by the Academy, along with the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Awards, celebrate the breadth of multilingual and translated poetry in the nation.
The Ambroggio Prize, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Awards are part of the American Poets Prizes, a suite of twelve major poetry awards and fellowships through which the Academy commits more than $1.3 million each year to support poets at various stages of their careers.
AMBROGGIO PRIZE
Las Horas Imposibles | The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press, 2025), written by Octavio Quintanilla and co-translated by Quintanilla and Natalia Treviño, was selected by Norma Cantú as the winner of the Ambroggio Prize, which is given annually 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, a nationally recognized publisher of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature. Previous winners include Mara Pastor, with translators María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong; Margarita Pintado Burgos, with translator Alejandra Quintana Arocho; and Elizabeth Torres.
Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024). He is the founder and director of the literature and arts festival VersoFrontera; publisher of Alabrava Press; and former poet laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual poems, Frontextos, have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.
Born in Mexico, Natalia Treviño is the author of the poetry collection Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014) and the chapbook VirginX (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her awards include the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Menada Literary Award from Macedonia, and the San Antonio Artist Foundation Literary Prize. She is a professor of English at Northwest Vista College.
About Quintanilla’s and Treviño’s winning manuscript, judge Cantú said: “Las Horas Imposibles | The Impossible Hours gathers seemingly simple everyday events and objects and elevates them to levels rarely seen: in poems like ‘Black Cow,’ for instance, the last line delivers a punch not easily forgotten. If this were a meal, the various courses would delight my senses. With alacrity and wit, the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum. The inclusion of computer-generated design poems adds to the impact of the volume. The co-translators more than ably render the original Spanish poems into an equally moving English, often opting for an unexpected translation: “jaula para el viento” [cage for the wind] is translated as ‘If we could cage the wind.’ I like the playful yet serious tone that disarms and allows the messages in the poems to sneak in and reverberate in the reader’s mind.”
Submissions to the 2025 Ambroggio Prize, judged by Giannina Braschi, will be accepted online from June 15 to September 15, 2024. To review the eligibility requirements and official guidelines, and to submit, visit: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/ambroggio-prize.
HAROLD MORTON LANDON TRANSLATION AWARD
Patrizio Ceccagnoli’s and Susan Stewart’s translation of Historiae by Antonella Anedda (NYRB Poets, 2023) has won the 2024 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, judged by Valzhyna Mort.
Founded in 1976, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award is given annually in recognition of a translation of poetry from any language into English that was published in the previous calendar year and that demonstrates literary excellence. Winners receive $1,000. Previous winners include Clayton Eshelman, Robert Fagles, Jen Hofer, Stephanie McCarter, W. S. Merwin, and Rajiv Mohabir.
Patrizio Ceccagnoli is a literary critic and translator, a managing editor of Italian Poetry Review, and an associate professor of Italian at the University of Kansas. He received his BA in classics in Perugia, Italy, and his PhD in Italian studies at Columbia University. He published, along with Paolo Valesio, the first edition of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s posthumous novel. In 2014, Ceccagnoli was a finalist for the American Literary Translators Association annual award for his work co-translating Milo De Angelis, and later translated five books by the Canadian writer Anne Carson.
Susan Stewart, the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and professor emerita of English at Princeton University, is a poet, critic, and translator. In addition to her many works of criticism, she is the author of seven poetry collections, including Cinder: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2017); Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Forest (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Her previous translations and co-translations include versions of poems by Amelia Rosselli, Milo De Angelis, Patrizia Cavalli, and Marcel Proust. Stewart’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Pew and Guggenheim Foundations. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2005 and more recently to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2023, she delivered the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford; they will soon appear with Oxford University Press as Poetry’s Nature.
Judge Valzhyna Mort wrote of the winning translation: “In Antonella Anedda’s Historiae, translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart, English-speaking readers receive a major contemporary poet who touches the scars of philosophy, geography, technology, and geology with breathtaking precision and delicacy. Anedda is a poet of forensic vision, directed unflinchingly at human and natural history, at everyday history, and at history with a capital H. In our shared moment of migration, deforestation, and hybrid wars, she is an artist consumed by responsibility and self-doubt. A resident of Rome, she was born in Sardinia, with an archaic bittersweetness in her mouth. She proves her honesty with her syntax, and her solitude is not hermetic but rather serves as a discipline in ethical thinking. She speaks to the unconscionable from inside the weather, on the collapsed border between the universal and the domestic. In the most private corners of her line breaks, when we believe to be one-on-one with the poet, we suddenly realize that we are one-on-one with the whole world. In her kitchen in Rome, she is everywhere, windswept, solitary. Historiae moves from Italian into English like a weather cyclone—a syntax cyclone—carrying light, sound, and grief.”
Submissions for the 2025 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award will be accepted online from September 15, 2024 to February 15, 2025. The judge will be announced prior to the opening of submissions. To review the eligibility requirements and official guidelines, and to submit, visit: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/harold-morton-landon-translation-award.
RAIZISS/DE PALCHI TRANSLATION AWARDS
Established in 1995, the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Awards recognize outstanding translations into English of modern Italian poetry through a $10,000 book prize and a $25,000 fellowship, given in alternating years.
Submissions for the 2025 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize, judged by Anna Kraczyna, Jennifer Scappettone, and Charif Shanahan, will be accepted online from September 15, 2024 to February 15, 2025. To review the eligibility requirements and official guidelines, and to submit, visit: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/raizissde-palchi-translation-awards.
About the Academy of American Poets
Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is a leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters across the United States and beyond. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program, which includes the Poet Laureate Fellowships. The organization 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 popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to K–12 educators, including the award-winning weekly Teach This Poem series; 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