Chicago’s own Haki Madhubuti and Angela Jackson are more than just a poet, author, playwright, educator and novelist. However, those roles are individually weighty enough.
Namely, they’re both institutions in their own right, having amassed bodies of work and spheres of literary influence that are wide and deep – and which undergirds why both are among 11 living legends receiving the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize being awarded by the Poetry Foundation in a history-making display of recognition and honor.
Madhubuti is widely regarded as one of the Black Arts Movement’s architects and the founder and publisher of Chicago’s Third World Press. He has published more than 36 books, including his recent collection, Taught By Women: Poems As Resistance Language, New and Selected. His honors include an American Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Prize, and a Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, among others.
“I feel honored, especially to be among other poets receiving the award, especially (fellow honorees) Sonia (Sanchez), Nikki (Giovanni), and Angela, who all are very close colleagues, friends, and sisters to me,” he said. “I see this as an acknowledgment of my work as a poet, but also cutting through the very ugly assessment of my life’s work as being too Black.
“I’ve always asked those people who accuse me of being too Black: Is it possible to be too white? Dedicating my life to Black people is no less than white poets and writers dedicating their lives to their own people,” he added. “Not to dismiss others, but to make sure my own people are primary in my heart. To be an artist, whether poet, non-fiction, fiction or musician, or artist of any persuasion, is to be one of the freest persons in the world. Yet, no one tells me what to do or how to do it. Partly, being as free as I am, has gotten me into serious trouble with those who run the world.”
Fellow honoree and Chicagoan Angela Jackson, outspokenly humble in her own right, currently serves as the Illinois Poet Laureate. Jackson’s honors include a Pushcart Prize and a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poetry collection, All These Roads Be Luminous, was nominated for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, Where I Must Go, won an American Book Award. In addition, Jackson has written four plays: Comfort Stew, Witness!, and Shango Diaspora: An African-American Myth of Womanhood and Love.
“I’m very excited about receiving the prize. It’s a prize I dreamed of,” said Jackson. “It’s one of the most coveted prices in the world of poetry. It makes me feel fine to know that people have appreciated my work for all these many years because it has been many years. I’m not the most popular poet or most well-known. I don’t make a lot of money. I don’t have a really prestigious university job. I just write well. It feels good to be as unapologetically black as I’ve always been, as unapologetically human as I’ve always been, and be rewarded.”
Madhubuti and Jackson are among the winners of the 2022 Pegasus Awards, a family of literary prizes that include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. The winners were honored at an awards gala on October 27 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
In recognition of Poetry magazine’s 110th anniversary, the Poetry Foundation is awarding ten additional Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes this year, resulting in $1,132,500 in prizes distributed to the 2022 winners. It is the most significant prize amount that the Foundation has ever awarded to a cohort of living poets at one time.
“We’re celebrating 110 years of Poetry magazine this year and approaching 20 years of the Poetry Foundation in 2023. We wanted to do something special to mark these milestones by honoring an outstanding cohort of writers whose work has brought comfort and inspiration to so many,” said Poetry Foundation President Michelle T. Boone. “Poetry shows us the way forward; there is no poetry without the imagination and talent of those behind the pen.”
The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is annually awarded to one living U.S. poet with an award of $100,000 in recognition of their outstanding lifetime achievement; it is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets and one of the nation’s most significant literary prizes.
However, in honor of the 110th anniversary of Poetry and alignment with the goals announced in its new Strategic Plan, the Poetry Foundation is awarding 11 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes this year. The decision not only commemorates a historic milestone for the Foundation and magazine but celebrates a diversity of backgrounds and styles from poets whose contributions to culture warrant the same recognition afforded to artists in other forms.
Joining Madhubuti and Jackson as Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winners are:
• Sandra Cisneros, poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist whose work explores the lives of the working class.
Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street has been translated into over 25 languages. Cisneros’s new collection of poetry, Woman Without Shame, is published by Knopf and Vintage Español in a Spanish language translation.
• CAConrad, who has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975; their honors include a Lambda Literary Award. As a young poet, they lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis. Conrad is the author of many books of poetry, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration and While Standing in Line for Death.
• Rita Dove is a writer of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays who served as the United States Poet Laureate from 1993-95. Her latest volume of poems, Playlist for the Apocalypse, was named a “Top Book of 2021” by The New York Times. Dove teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
• Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet and has served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and California. He has authored more than 30 books, including the recent poetry collection Every Day We Get More Illegal and the translation Akrílica. The Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School is scheduled to open in Fresno this fall.
• Sharon Olds is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Arias, short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Stag’s Leap, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at .
• Nikki Giovanni is a poet and the author of several works of nonfiction and children’s literature and multiple recordings, including the Emmy-award, nominated The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Her recent publications include Make Me Rain: Poems and Prose and Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid.
• Sonia Sanchez is a poet, playwright, professor, activist, and one of the foremost leaders of the Black Studies movement. Sanchez is the author of over 20 books, including Morning Haiku, Shake Loose My Skin, and her Collected Poems, published in 2021. Her honors include an American Book Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, a Langston Hughes Poetry Award, and a Robert Frost Medal, among others; in 2011, she was named the first Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.
• Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor; he is the author of The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems and Sight Lines, which won a National Book Award for Poetry. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012–17, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
• Patti Smith, a Chicago native, has authored books of nonfiction and poetry, including Year of the Monkey, Devotion, and M Train; her new collection, A Book of Days, is forthcoming. Her honors include the 2010 National Book Award for her bestselling memoir Just Kids, a PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, and being named a Doctor of Humane Letters from Columbia University.
• The Poetry Foundation also named Elizabeth Acevedo as the New Young People’s Poet Laureate. Acevedo, the bestselling author of The Poet X, will serve as the 2022–2024 Young People’s Poet Laureate. The aim of the Laureate is to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians throughout their two-year tenure.
In addition, Kevin Quashie will be honored with a Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Quashie is the 2022 recipient for his book Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, which draws on Black feminist literary texts. He teaches Black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University.
