New York, NY (October 18, 2024)—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE is the recipient of the WALLACE STEVENS AWARD, which is given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. The award carries a stipend of $100,000. EVIE SHOCKLEY is the recipient of the ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS FELLOWSHIP. This prize recognizes distinguished poetic achievement and carries with it a stipend of $25,000 and a residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
“Over the years, Academy Chancellors have gathered to identify the remarkable contributions of American poets,” said Ricardo Maldonado, President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. “Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Claudia Rankine, and William Carlos Williams—these are just a few of the poets whose distinguished achievements were recognized with the Academy Fellowship. Meanwhile John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich’s outstanding mastery of the art form garnered them the Wallace Stevens Award. We are thrilled to be celebrating ninety years of poets and poetry as an Academy by honoring our Chancellors’ newest selections: Evie Shockley and Naomi Shihab Nye—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.”
“Among the most momentous decisions that the Academy’s fifteen-member Board of Chancellors will make in any given year is who will win the Wallace Stevens Award and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. The significance of these honors is not only measured by the bounty of the prize purse and the illustrious roster of prior winners but also by the composition of the jury,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair. “I wish to acknowledge that the 2024 honorees, Naomi Shihab Nye and Evie Shockley, were selected by a jury of Chancellors whom I’m grateful to name as Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Nikky Finney, Carolyn Forché, Kimiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, Ilya Kaminsky, Dorianne Laux, Ed Roberson, Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Diane Seuss, Natasha Trethewey, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Kevin Young.”
About the Winners and the Awards
Nye is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Grace Notes: Poems about Family (HarperCollins, 2024); Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020); and The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019). She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency (USIA) three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts. Nye’s other honors include awards from the International Poetry Forum and the Texas Institute of Letters, the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988, she received the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, judged by W. S. Merwin. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2009 to 2014, and was the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021. In April 2022, for National Poetry Month, Nye served as the Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day. She lives in San Antonio.
Academy Chancellor Afaa Michael Weaver observes of Nye: “In a stunning spectrum of works published in a period beginning nearly fifty 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.”
Established in 1936 and given in memory of poet James Ingram Merrill, with generous support from the T. S. Eliot Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship was the first award of its kind in the United States. The Wallace Stevens Award was created and endowed by poet, painter, sculptor, printmaker, novelist, and memoirist Dorothea Tanning in 1994.
Shockley’s first collection, The Gorgon Goddess, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 2001. She is also the author of suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry; semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), which also won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, Shockley has received the 2023 Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Poetry Prize, the Stephen Henderson Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize. Her poetry has also been supported by fellowships and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook. Shockley was a coeditor of the poetry journal jubilat from 2004 to 2007 and Poem-a-Day Guest Editor in August 2018. She teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey.
Recognizing Shockley’s body of work, Academy Chancellor Ed Roberson notes: “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.”
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/.