New York, NY (September 26, 2024)—The Academy of American Poets, a leading champion of poets and poetry in the United States, is pleased to announce the 2024 winners of the LENORE MARSHALL POETRY PRIZE and the JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD. These awards, part of the Academy’s American Poets Prizes, reflect the organization’s mission to support poets at all stages of their careers.

“As an organization, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can honor the limitless possibilities that poets bring to our communities through words,” said Ricardo Maldonado, President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. “These two awards represent the exciting promise of helping readers gain new understandings of our world while creating new, living literary canons. We congratulate the 2024 recipients of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and James Laughlin Award: Ariana Benson and Michelle Peñaloza, respectively. We’re grateful for the care and attention of our celebrated judges, some of whom are former winners themselves, as we bring these two exceptional collections into the hands of so many readers across the country.” 

ARIANA BENSON’s collection Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) has received the LENORE MARSHALL POETRY PRIZE. This $25,000 award recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year.

Benson is a Southern Black ecopoet, born in Norfolk, Virginia. Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) also won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She is an alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for students at historically Black colleges and universities. She also holds masters of arts degrees in both poetic practice and scriptwriting, which she earned as a Marshall Scholar. 

About the collection, poets and prize judges Kyle Dargan, Yesenia Montilla, and D. A. Powell say: “The lush gravity of Black Pastoral’s phrasing and lyricism presses our ears and our soles to the peat of an often dismissed world of not only Black experience but also, within it, Black ecology, Black joy, and an investment in Black futurities. Benson’s collection embraces and recasts the idea of ‘escape’ and the material, emotional, and psychological stakes of the relationship between nature and liberation for people who have known different seasons of bondage.

This hand: made to pick in heat, made to find sugar // in low places [...]. // What a sight we must be / to passing traffic. What a sight I am // to those watching from earlier fields.

“These meticulously constructed and striking poems carry us through the past, in which land was used as a weapon against its own tenders, a present in which love of land manifests as a tenderness both intimate and illuminating, and a future where any field can bloom with wonder.

“The precision and patience of this work allows for that collapsing of time; it bends space and, in doing so, offers us a revelatory perspective on how regarding nature includes the regarding of a people. What we love about trees and flowers, swamps and forests, is what we love and behold in our own bodies—the bond is there and the connection is the miracle. It is an achievement for language, sound, and form to take root upon the page, to compel in this way. This work is deeply successful in the naming of what living could be and was and is and will be for all living things.”

MICHELLE PEÑALOZA’s book All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems (Persea Books, 2025) has won the JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD, which is given to recognize and support a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year. Endowed by the Drue Heinz Trust, the annual award is named for the poet and publisher James Laughlin, founder of New Directions. The winning poet receives a cash prize of $5,000 and a one-week residency at the Betsy Hotel in Miami.

Peñaloza has also authored Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk Prize (Inlandia Books, 2019). Peñaloza has received support from notable literary institutions, including Artist Trust, PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists), Literary Arts, and VONA (Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation). The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, she was born in the suburbs of Detroit and raised in Nashville. She now lives in rural Northern California.

About the book, judges Tarfia Faizullah, Keetje Kuipers, and Barbara Jane Reyes say: “Navigating humor and sorrow—and never neglecting the startling and subversive joy that can be found at their intersection—Michelle Peñaloza uses music and elegantly constructed moments of surprise to guide her reader with a seemingly effortless yet brilliantly deliberate hand. Transposing the mythologies and historical artifacts of an often buried Philippine history and the complex diasporic self-vision of a post-colonial Pinay daughter, Peñaloza’s All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems is a sure-footed and confident second collection that establishes this poet’s vision as distinct and unforgettable. These poems illuminate the expansive and specific perspective of a multilingual and multicultural speaker with playful precision and sophistication, utilizing modes and meanings that renew the power of storytelling. Here is an unapologetic voice, one that is not afraid to take up necessary space and to claim her belonging in the world, a voice that rings as clearly as a fiercely struck bell.”

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 U.S. 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/.