Poetry Foundation Celebrates the 20th Anniversary of the Pegasus Awards and Announces 2024 Recipients

CHICAGO, September 10, 2024—The Poetry Foundation is proud to announce the recipients of the 2024 Pegasus Awards, a family of literary prizes established in 2004. They will be honored at the Pegasus Awards ceremony in Chicago in October 2024.

“For 20 years, the Poetry Foundation has had the honor of recognizing dozens of poetry luminaries with the annual Pegasus Awards,” said Poetry Foundation president and CEO, Michelle T. Boone. “It’s our privilege to recognize four remarkable individuals who have dedicated their lives to poetry. On behalf of the entire staff and our board of trustees, we extend our most sincere congratulations to the 2024 Pegasus Awards honorees: Li-Young Lee, Jen Benka, Elizabeth Sarah Coles, and Carole Boston Weatherford.” 

Li-Young Lee Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recognizes a living United States poet for outstanding lifetime achievement with an award of $100,000. Presented annually, it is one of the most prestigious honors awarded to poets and is one of the nation’s largest literary cash prizes.

Li-Young Lee is a poet, translator, and author of five poetry collections and the memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. Lee’s honors include a Lannan Literary Award, Whiting Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, I. B. Lavan Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a William Carlos Williams award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, and many others.

Lee was born in Djakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents, both political exiles from powerful families. In the 1950s, anti-Chinese sentiment began rising in Indonesia, and Lee’s father was arrested and held as a political prisoner for a year. After his release in 1959, the Lee family fled through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan to arrive in the United States in 1964. 

Lee’s poetry is influenced by the mystical, spiritual, and philosophical, and he often uses narrative and memories to investigate the spiritual and universal; he writes on family, memory, and mortality, and his work’s relationship with these concepts has evolved throughout his career. Lee has said that he considers every poem to be a “descendant of God.”

Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry Recognizes Jen Benka 

Debuting in 2023, the Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry is bestowed in recognition of commitment and extraordinary work in poetry and the literary arts through administration, advocacy, education, publishing, or service. The award includes an annual cash prize of $25,000.

Jen Benka is the author of the poetry collections Pinko and A Box of Longing with Fifty Drawers, as well as the artist book A Revisioning of the Preamble and an Xeric-winning and Eisner-nominated comic book series. 

Benka has worked in service to poets and poetry for 25 years, including as president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets. During the pandemic, Benka coorganized, with six other national cultural leaders, the Artist Relief Fund, which raised and provided $25 million in emergency grants to more than 4,600 artists and writers. While at the Academy of American Poets, Benka simultaneously envisioned and co-launched the Literary Arts Emergency Fund, which provided $7.8 million to hundreds of nonprofit literary arts organizations and publishers. 

Benka has also been the managing director of Poets & Writers and the director of marketing and development at 826 National. Benka now works as a consultant to nonprofit and philanthropic institutions.

Elizabeth Sarah Coles Receives Award for Work of Criticism

The Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism is an annual $10,000 cash prize that commends an outstanding book-length work of criticism published in the United States in the prior calendar year. Eligible works include biographies, essay collections, and critical editions that consider the subject of poetry or poets.

Elizabeth Sarah Coles’s Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist, which examines and celebrates Carson, the poet, translator, and classicist as an experimental scholar and reader, is the winner of the 2024 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Coles’s previous honors include a T.R. Henn Prize for English and a Wood-Whistler Medal and Scholarship, both from the University of Cambridge, and a Gradiva Award for her coedited volume, Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life.

Coles earned an MA (Cantab) and an MPhil at the University of Cambridge and a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona from 2021-2024, and is a member of the university's Centre d'Estudis en Estètica, Religió i Cultura Contemporània. Coles is the director of Performing the Lecture, a program of lecture-performances held in partnership with Barcelona’s Centre Cultura Contemporània. 

The 2024 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism finalists were Terrance Hayes for Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry and Roger Reeves for Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. 

Carole Boston Weatherford Named Young People’s Poet Laureate

Appointed every two years, the title of Young People’s Poet Laureate (YPPL) is awarded to a poet in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers while working to instill a lifelong love of poetry with new audiences. This two-year appointment comes with a $25,000 annual stipend and additional programmatic funding to support work that promotes poetry to young people and their families, teachers, and librarians.

Carole Boston Weatherford has written more than 70 books and has received numerous awards, including multiple Caldecott Honors and Coretta Scott King Honors. Her career achievements have been recognized with a Ragan-Rubin Award for Literary Achievement from the North Carolina English Teachers Association, a North Carolina Award for Literature, and induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and earned a BA from American University, an MA from the University of Baltimore, and an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. A retired Fayetteville State University professor, she lives in Maryland.

Of her work, Weatherford says, “My mission is to mine the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles that center on African American resistance, resilience, remarkability, rejoicing and remembrance.” Inspired by oral traditions and African American heritage, she sometimes collaborates with her son, rapper and illustrator Jeffery Boston Weatherford. 

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. The Foundation works to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. Follow the Poetry Foundation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and Poetry magazine on Twitter.

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