Emily Skaja Wins 2018 Walt Whitman Award

In award news, the Academy of American Poets has announced that Joy Harjo has selected Emily Skaja as the recipient of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award, "the nation’s most valuable first-book prize for a poet, for her manuscript, Brute, which will be published by Graywolf Press in April 2019." More:

About Brute, 2018 Walt Whitman Award judge Joy Harjo says: “Brute, though a collection of singular poems, is essentially one long elegiac howl for the end of a relationship. It never lets up—this living—even when the world as we knew it is crushed. So what do we do with the brokenness? We document it, as Emily Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.”

 

Emily Skaja was born and raised in northern Illinois. She received an MFA in creative writing from Purdue University. Her honors include the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Intro Journals Project Award; the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize; the Russell Prize from Two Sylvias Press; and the Thomas H. Scholl and Elizabeth Boyd Thompson Poetry Prize. She is the associate poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review and a Taft Research fellow at the University of Cincinnati, where she is finishing a PhD in creative writing and literature with a certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.