Patricia Smith & Donika Kelly Win Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Prize

Congratulations to Patricia Smith and Donika Kelly, winners of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, respectively, for their recent poetry collections, Incendiary Art and Bestiary. Claremont Graduate University announced the news today. At the Daily Bulletin, Peter Larsen explains that Smith's prize-winning collection, Incendiary Art, "explores such topics as the violence done to black men and the grieving of black mothers," and the award is "one of the most prestigious and lucrative honors in poetry, and is given to a poet in mid-career. Its $100,000 prize is the largest in the world given for a single volume of poetry." From there: 

A second poetry prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, will go to Donika Kelly for her collection “Bestiary,” this honor for a first book by a poet whose work shows great promise coming with a $10,000 prize.

Kate Tufts established the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards in 1992, a year after the death of her husband, honoring the successful shipyard executive’s lifelong love of poetry, a passion he pursued himself with poems published in magazines including The New Yorker, Esquire and Harper’s. A year later, his widow, who died in 1997, launched the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

“Kate would have been so pleased to see another impressive group of finalists in both categories this year,” said Lori Anne Ferrell, a Claremont Graduate University professor and director of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, in a written statement. “And I think she would have been thrilled to see the awards going to Smith and Kelly, whose works engage with and challenge the world in such powerful, poignant, and unexpected ways.”

Learn more at the Daily Bulletin.