Jorie Graham, the poet behind this year's Summer Recommendation title Fast, has just been awarded a lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets. The Wallace Stevens Award is given to writers with 'outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry', and comes with $100,000.
Academy of American Poets Chancellor Claudia Rankine has said the following:
Jorie Graham’s masterful poems traverse almost four decades of inquiry into what it means to be in relation. Her work pulls forward our mythical, historical, environmental, and personal narratives in order to inhabit our most ordinary and collective experiences. Hers is the patience of the return; repetition in her work unearths the nuances of fundamental desires to live, to love, to be. Clear-eyed and with a scope that encompasses what is both known and unknown, her fifteen collections have built towards a brilliant insistence on presence.
Our congratulations go to Jorie Graham! You can purchase her most recent poetry book on our website here.