Justin Phillip Reed's Indecency Wins 2018 National Book Award in Poetry

This year's winner for the National Book Award in Poetry goes to Justin Phillip Reed for his debut collection, Indecency. Reed beat out a strong list of finalists, including books by Rae Armantrout and Terrance Hayes, both of whom are no strangers to national awards. Of Indecency, this year's judges write:

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful―the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

Also taking home an award this year in the Young People's Literature category is Elizabeth Acevedo for her novel in verse, The Poet X. At NPR Colin Dwyer writes: 

The daughter of Dominican immigrants, [Acevedo] said she goes through the world "with a chip on my shoulder."

"As the child of immigrants, as a black woman, as a Latina, as someone whose accented voice holds certain neighborhoods, whose body holds certain stories, I always feel like I have to prove that I am worthy enough and there will never be an award or accolade that will take that away," she told the crowd.

"But every single time I meet a reader who looks at me and says, 'I have never seen my story until I read yours,' I'm reminded of why this matters. And that's not going to be an award and it's not going to be an accolade. It's going to be looking someone in the face and saying, 'I see you,' and in return being told that I am seen."

Congratulations to all the winners!