Rita Dove Honored With 2019 Wallace Stevens Award
Today, the Academy of American Poets announced winners of their 2019 American Poets Prizes. Among those honored is Rita Dove, who takes home the Wallace Stevens Prize for her continued mastery in the art of poetry. The prize comes with a stipend of $100,000, one of the largest awards for the art. A host poets are also honored, including Ilya Kaminsky, Kyle Dargan, and Aditi Machado, among others. More from the Academy of American Poets about the suite of awards, and then honors for Rita Dove:
The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 American Poets Prizes, which are among the most valuable and venerable poetry prizes in the United States. This year the organization has awarded more funds to poets than any other organization, giving a total of $1,250,000 to poets at various stages of their careers.
RITA DOVE has received the WALLACE STEVENS AWARD, which is given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award carries a stipend of $100,000. Recipients are nominated and elected by a majority vote of the Academy’s Board of Chancellors. Past winners of the prize have included John Ashbery, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Adrienne Rich.
Rita Dove is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including Thomas and Beulah(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; On the Bus with Rosa Parks (W. W. Norton, 1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Collected Poems 1974-2004 (W.W. Norton, 2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to poetry, Dove has published a novel, a book of short stories, and numerous essays. Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005 to 2011. Among her many honors are the National Humanities Medal bestowed by President Bill Clinton, and the National Medal of Arts presented by President Barack Obama—making her the only poet who has received both medals, as well as the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
About Dove, Academy Chancellor Ellen Bass said: “The depth of Rita Dove’s insight is astonishing. She sees into our most complex relationships and renders those truths with startling precision. She delivers us to ourselves. With technical virtuosity and luscious music, her poems torch us with beauty and brutality, innocence and ruin. Fiercely political and exactly intimate, this is brilliant poetry at its height. In her poem ‘Soprano,’ Dove writes: ‘When you hit / the center // of a note, spin / through and off // the bell lip / into heaven, // the soul dies / for an instant—’ Rita Dove could be describing her own poetry!”
Continue to poets.org and see all the award winners this year. Congrats to all!