Ed Roberson Awarded 2016 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

The Poetry Foundation, and we at Harriet, are overjoyed to announce Ed Roberson has received the 2016 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for outstanding lifetime achievement in the art of poetry. Henry Bienen, president of the Poetry Foundation, honors Roberson by stating: “The Lilly Poetry Prize acknowledges Roberson’s courage in breaking with literary traditions and in his contribution to poetry throughout his distinguished career.” Of Roberson's achievements and talents, Poetry magazine editor Don Share remarks: “In both language and in life (his studies have taken him to Alaska, South America, Africa and Bermuda), Ed Roberson is an explorer. Working at a healthy remove from the precincts of professional critics and tastemakers, but admired deeply by them, Roberson’s ten books of poetry take readers, as they have taken the poet himself, to every corner of the vivid labyrinth of life.” More about Roberson:

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Ed Roberson studied painting in his youth and is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh. His extensive travels inform his work, which is also influenced by spirituals and the blues, and by visual art, such as the mixed media collages of Romare Bearden. Poet and critic Michael Palmer has called Roberson “one of the most deeply innovative and critically acute voices of our time.”

Roberson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2010), which was a runner-up for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize poetry award; The New Wing of the Labyrinth (2009); City Eclogue (2006); Atmosphere Conditions (1999), which was chosen by Nathaniel Mackey for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for an Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Just In: Word of Navigational Change: New and Selected Work (1998); and Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (1995), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. His most recent publication is the chapbook Closest Pronunciation (2013). His earlier collections include Etai-Eken (1975) and When Thy King is a Boy (1970). Words and phrases in Roberson’s experimental poetry actively resist parsing, using instead what Mackey has called “double-jointed syntax” to explore and bend themes of race, history, and culture. “I’m not creating a new language. I’m just trying to un-White-Out the one we’ve got,” said Roberson in a 2006 interview with Chicago Postmodern Poetry.

Roberson’s honors include a Lila Wallace Writers’ Award, a Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, and the 2016 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. His work has been included in Best American Poetry.

Roberson lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and Northwestern University.

Also honored are editors Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue who will take home the 2016 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism for The Poems of T.S. Eliot: The Annotated Text. Volumes 1 & 2, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. Praising the editorial work of Ricks and McCue, Don Share says “The authoritative and remarkable editing of the poems of T.S. Eliot by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue is unprecedented; their work illuminates every one of Eliot’s poems in ways unimaginable until now. This work will remain invaluable to readers and students of poetry for many generations.”

Congrats to all!