Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, a short story writer, a novelist, and an essayist who explores the lives of working-class people. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in poetry and fiction,...

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. As a young poet, they lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early...

Rita Dove (she/her) was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she attended Miami University of Ohio, Universität Tübingen in Germany, and the University of Iowa, where...

Poet Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. She graduated with a degree in history from Fisk University. A world-renowned...

The son of farmworkers, poet Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, in 1948. He is a graduate of UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  During...

Angela Jackson is a Chicago poet, playwright, and novelist. She has received numerous honors for both fiction and poetry, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Poetry Society...

Dr. Haki R. Madhubuti, poet, author, publisher, and educator, is regarded as an architect of the Black Arts Movement and is founder and publisher of Chicago's Third World Press. Third...

Poet Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley, California where she was raised, she has said, as a “hellfire Calvinist.” She attended Stanford...

Sonia Sanchez was born in 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her BA in political science from Hunter College in 1955, did postgraduate work at New York University, and studied...

Patti Smith was born in Chicago, raised in South Jersey, and moved to New York City in 1967. Her extensive achievements as a performer, an author, and a recording and...

Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press,...

Patricia Smith (she/her) has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press,...

Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Portland, Oregon. She earned a BA in Chinese literature from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA from the...

Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, into a military family: she is the daughter of one of the last of the Tuskegee Airmen. Her mother was a teacher. Nelson...

As a poet, essayist, translator, editor, and attorney, Martín Espada has dedicated much of his career to the pursuit of social justice, including fighting for human rights and reclaiming the...

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She earned her BA from the University of New Mexico and MFA from the...

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Ed Roberson studied painting in his youth and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh. His extensive travels inform his work, which is also influenced...

Alice Notley has become one of America’s greatest living poets. She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of...

Born in Miami and raised in Southern California, poet, novelist, editor, and critic Nathaniel Mackey earned his BA from Princeton University and his PhD from Stanford University. Mackey is the...

Born in New York, poet and translator Marie Ponsot was the daughter of a teacher and a wine importer and was raised Catholic, a faith she kept her whole life....

W.S. Di Piero was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned his BA from St. Joseph’s College and MA from San Francisco State College. A poet, essayist, art critic,...

David Ferry is an acclaimed American poet, professor, and translator. Ferry’s translations, which include some of the world's major works of poetry, are known for their fluency and grace. In...

Eleanor Ross Taylor was born in 1920 in Norwood, North Carolina, and graduated from Women’s College, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in 1942.  While studying at Vanderbilt...

Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Howe grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Stanford University. “If someone is alone reading my...

Gary Snyder began his career in the 1950s as a noted member of the “Beat Generation,” though he has since explored a wide range of social and spiritual matters in...

Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 in DePew, New York, and grew up in Buffalo. She studied at Howard University, before transferring to SUNY Fredonia, near her hometown. She was discovered...

Richard Wilbur was born on March 1, 1921 in New York City. One of the most lauded and honored poets of 20th century American verse, Wilbur was the second poet...

Hailed by poet Paul Muldoon in the Times Literary Supplement as “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation,” C.K. Williams created a highly respected body of work, including...

Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching...

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at...

Poet and translator Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924. The daughter of teachers, she and her family were forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was...

Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The son of a carpenter, Komunyakaa has said that he was first alerted to the power of language through his grandparents, who were...

Carl Dennis was born in 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley. He taught at...

An enduring presence in American poetry, Maxine Kumin’s career spanned over half a century. Maxine Kumin (née Winokur) was born to a Reform Jewish family in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She attended...

William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His numerous collections of...

William Matthews was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He earned a BA from Yale and MFA from the University of North Carolina. The author of eleven books of poetry, Matthews earned...

Gerald Stern has been called an “American original,” “a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary,” and, by his friend Stanley Kunitz, “the wilderness in American poetry.” Over dozens of books, and...

Archibald Randolph (A.R.) Ammons was born in rural North Carolina on February 18, 1926. His experiences growing up on a cotton and tobacco farm during the Great Depression inspired a...

Donald Hall was considered one of the major American poets of his generation. His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature....

Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Wright attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’...

John Ashbery was recognized as one of the greatest 20th-century American poets. He won nearly every major American award for poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the...

David Wagoner was recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body...

"Now and then a poet comes along whose work ranges across wide and diverse territories of form, attitude, and emotion—yet with the necessary intelligence that belies a deep, lifelong engagement...

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa and raised in Eldora, Iowa. She earned a BA from Iowa State Teachers College and an MA from the...

Anthony Hecht was a renowned poet and critic. A longtime professor of poetry at the University of Rochester, Hecht also taught at institutions such as Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, and Smith...

Philip Levine was one of the leading poetic voices of his generation, “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” according to Edward Hirsch. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Levine was...

During her life, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Widely read and hugely influential, Rich’s career spanned seven decades and has hewed closely to...