The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that Carolyn Forché will judge the 2016 Walt Whitman Award, the nation’s most valuable first-book prize for poetry. The winner of the Whitman Award will receive $5,000 and be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. In addition, the Academy of American Poets will purchase and send thousands of copies of the book to its members, making it one of the most widely distributed poetry books of the year. The award winner also receives a six-week all-expenses-paid residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, will be featured in American Poets magazine, and on their website Poets.org, which reaches millions of readers each year.

Established in 1975, the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award is designed to encourage the work of emerging poets. Previous recipients include poets Nicole Cooley, Suji Kwock Kim, Eric Pankey, Matt Rasmussen, and Alberto Ríos, among others. The most recent winner of the prize was Sjohnna McCray for his book Rapture, selected by judge Tracy K. Smith, which will be published by Graywolf in April 2016.

The annual award is one of the American Poets Prizes, a collection of seven major prizes given by the Academy of American Poets, and it is made possible by financial support from the organization’s members. Other prizes include the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which is the most generous book-of-the-year prize in poetry; the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement; and the $25,000 Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

Submissions for the 2016 Walt Whitman Award will be accepted online between September 1 and November 1, 2015, and the recipient will be announced in April 2016, during National Poetry Month.

For more information about the Walt Whitman Award and the American Poets Prizes, visit poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes.

About Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is currently director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Winner of numerous awards, her honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship (for distinguished poetic achievement), as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Forché’s books of poetry include: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994); The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1982), which received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W. W. Norton, 1993) and the coeditor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (W. W. Norton, 2014).

About the Academy of American Poets

The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. The organization produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly-funded website for poets and poetry; National Poetry Month; the popular Poem-a-Day series; American Poets magazine; resources for K-12 educators; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. In addition, since its founding in 1934, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization through its American Poets Prizes. For more information, visit Poets.org.

About Graywolf Press

Graywolf Press is an independent, nonprofit publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of contemporary American and international literature. For more information, please visit www.graywolfpress.org.

About Civitella Ranieri

Located in a fifteenth century castle in the Umbrian region of Italy, Civitella Ranieri Center is a workplace for international writers, composers, and visual artists. Since 1995, Civitella has hosted more than six hundred Fellows and Director’s Guests.  In keeping with the spirit of its founder, Ursula Corning, and the tradition of hospitality and support for the arts that she established at the castle, the Center enables its Fellows to pursue their work and to exchange ideas in a unique and inspiring setting.  For more information, visit www.civitella.org.