Poet Naomi Shihab Nye receives $150,000 lifetime achievement award

By The Associated Press on October 18, 2024.

NEW YORK (AP) – Naomi Shihab Nye is this year’s winner of the Wallace Stevens Award, a $150,000 lifetime achievement honor named for the celebrated 20th century poet.

Nye’s prize was announced Friday by the Academy of American Poets, which has previously given the award to Louise Glück, John Ashbery and Rita Dove among others. Nye, 72, is known for such collections as “Fuel,” “Yellow Queen” and “Grace Notes,” which came out this year.

“In a stunning spectrum of works published in a period beginning nearly fifty years ago, Naomi Shihab Nye has borne witness to the complexities of cultural difference that connect us as human beings, evidencing a firm commitment to the poet as bearer of light and hope,” Academy Chancellor Afaa Michael Weaver said in a statement.

“In celebrating her Palestinian heritage with a gentle but unflinching commitment, her body of work is a rare and precious living entity in our time, when the tragic conflict between Gaza and Israel threatens to deepen wounds and resentments everywhere.

The academy also announced that it had awarded Evie Shockley the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which includes a $25,000 stipend and residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams and Claudia Rankine are among previous Fellowship winners.

Shockley’s “suddenly we” was a National Book Award finalist last year. Her other books include “semiautomatic,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

“In her poetry, she uses the persons of history in the way that other writers and landscape painters use the colors of the light on things to create space and time,” Academy Chancellor Ed Roberson said in a statement.

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