New York, NY (October 17, 2025)—The Academy of American Poets congratulates Cornelius Eady on receiving its top prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement in poetry and carries a stipend of $100,000. The Academy is also proud to honor Aracelis Girmay with the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes poetic achievement and carries with it a stipend of $25,000 and a residency at the T. S. Eliot House. Eady and Girmay will receive the honors at the Chancellors Reading on Friday, October 17, at 6:30 p.m. at the Guggenheim Museum. The recipients of both awards were chosen by the fifteen esteemed poets on the Academy’s Board of Chancellors.
“The Academy of American Poets welcomes Cornelius Eady to the star-studded roster of the Wallace Stevens Award recipients, a who’s who of American poetry that includes John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Joy Harjo, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Simic, among other masters of the artform,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Academy Board Chair. “Likewise, Aracelis Girmay joins a dazzling array of American visionaries who have received the Academy Fellowship, spanning Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Ilya Kaminsky, Ezra Pound, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and other giants.”
The awards will be presented to the winners at the Chancellors Reading at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The Academy of American Poets thanks the following individuals for their leadership support of this event: Cheryl C. and Blair Effron, Alexandra Jackson, Camille Lannan, Tess O’Dwyer, and Andrew Schiff and Alexandra Wolfe Schiff.
2025 Wallace Stevens Award Citation
Academy Chancellor Afaa Michael Weaver writes of Eady: “In his passion for the immediacy of experience, for the dangers both present and emergent for African Americans, Cornelius Eady has inhabited the intersection of poetry as song and the poetic effect of music to produce a body of work that announces and looks to protect the resilience and tenderness of the Black presence in America. His poetry explores the unions of states, states of remembrance and celebration, fear and courage. Whether it is to expose the untruths as horrific as false accusations, or to make palpable a man’s tears as he grieves his relationship with his father, Eady’s work inhabits that intersection of poetry and song as a poet and songwriter, reading his soul in relationship to the aggregate humanity he recognizes and defends, even as he takes to his right of citizenship, which is to question the questionable, whether it is theft or the taking of lives. Where other poets may admire music, Eady creates it, and he does so as a poet who knows the heart’s potential to sing in the written word. He celebrates performance as well as language as the medium of the written word and sound as the substantive structure of music. This is the soul work of a poet who reaches back to ancient origins of poetry, when it was accompanied by music, or where music inspired the minds and memories of those who kept the memories of a community. We have this griot, Cornelius Eady, and his body of work, as remarkable as love itself.”
2025 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Citation
Academy Chancellors Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Kimiko Hahn, Diane Seuss, and Tracy K. Smith said of Aracelis Girmay: “Girmay is a poet of conscience, generosity, and care. Her poems unite history with the terms and the tenor of intimacy. They bring love and loving regard into the spaces where violence, disregard, and begrudging tolerance have previously dominated. Her poems name and claim loss and build from it a language of reunion and recovery. Violence is not erased; history is not absolved. But we are reminded that language is also a tool of healing and survival.”
In an essay for The Paris Review, Girmay quotes Gwendolyn Brooks: “My way is from woe to wonder.” And in the same essay, she describes her remarkable capacity for drawing interconnections between elegy and reverence: “For every sorrow I write, also I press my forehead to the ground.” Indeed, she illuminates the continuum that bridges woe and wonder, dissolving oppositions through the alchemy of syntax and metaphor. Her work reminds us that the lyric poem remains powerful at a time in which tenderness, honesty, delicacy, and vulnerability are akin to endangered species. Her subjects are expansive, unified by what she has called “the long, constant work of our trying to get free.”
While Girmay’s poetics of commitment is evergreen, in the increasingly dire unfolding of the twenty-first century, her voice also becomes useful in contexts where the literary has not been prioritized. Her voice and vision—her courage to witness and name the grievances which whole vocabularies have been crafted to deny—is essential to the difficult but necessary feats of coalition, compassion, and humility. We honor Aracelis Girmay for the grace and ferocity of her vision, and her generosity of time, energy, and spirit. She is a true poetry citizen, and her poems are sentient beings; they breathe and transform.”
About Cornelius Eady
Poet and playwright Cornelius Eady is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008), a nominee for an NAACP Image Award; Brutal Imagination (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991), which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize; and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Press, 1986), selected by Philip Booth , Louise Glück, and Charles Simic as the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets. In 1996, Eady and fellow poet Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization serving Black poets of various backgrounds and acting as a safe space for intellectual engagement and critical debate. In 2016, Derricotte and Eady accepted the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community on behalf of Cave Canem. Eady’s honors include the Prairie Schooner’s Strousse Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2023, he received the Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry alongside Derricotte. The following year, he received Furious Flower’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Eady has served as director of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, City College of New York, SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, The Writer’s Voice, William & Mary, and Sweet Briar College. He was the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and a professor of English and theatre at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Eady is the Chair of Excellence in the English department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
About Aracelis Girmay
Aracelis Girmay is the author of Green of All Heads (BOA Editions, 2025); the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016), for which she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature; Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award. Girmay is also the author and collagist of the picture book changing, changing (George Braziller, 2005). With her sister Ariana Fields, she collaborated on the picture book What Do You Know? (Enchanted Lion, 2021). She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Girmay is currently the editor-at-large for BOA Editions’ Blessing the Boats Selections and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. She was a visiting writer in Queens College’s MFA program and a faculty member at the School for Interdisciplinary Arts at Hampshire College. She has also taught poetry at Pratt Institute and in Drew University’s low-residency MFA program. Girmay is currently the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University.
About the Academy of American Poets
Now in its ninety-first year, 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, visit https://poets.org/.