Ten finalists have been selected for the 2019 Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award offers a prize of $100,000 to a mid-career poet, while the Kate Tufts Discovery Award offers a prize of $10,000 for a first book by an emerging poet. Both prizes are given for books published in the previous year.
This year’s finalists for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award are Tyree Daye for River Hymns (American Poetry Review Press), Diana Khoi Nguyen for Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing), Justin Phillip Reed for Indecency (Coffee House Press), Vanessa Angélica Villarreal for Beast Meridian (Noemi Press), and Javier Zamora for Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press).
The finalists for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award are CAConrad for While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books), Terrance Hayes for American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books), Brenda Hillman for Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (Wesleyan University Press), Dawn Lundy Martin for Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press), and Craig Santos Perez for from unincorporated territory [lukao] (Omnidawn).
Timothy Donnelly chaired the judging committee this year. Winners will be announced in February.
The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award was established in 1992 by Kate Tufts at Claremont Graduate University; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award followed in 1993. The awards are given to provide recognition, visibility and financial support to poets.