Nathaniel Mackey has been awarded the 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors the lifetime achievement of a living U.S. poet. Presented annually by the Poetry Foundation, the $100,000 prize is one of the nations largest literary awards.
Mackey is the author of numerous collections, including the National Book Award-winning Splay Anthem. He also published book-length installments of his ongoing prose work From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, beginning with Bedouin Hornbook in 1986.
In addition, the Poetry Foundation also awarded its first annual Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism to the University of California Press for two books in their Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series: Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays, edited by Peter Quartermain, and Robert Duncan: Collected Essays and Other Prose, edited by James Maynard. The press will receive $7,500, with five finalists receiving $1,000 each.
Both prizes will be presented at a ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on June 9.
*An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Nathaniel Mackey's Bass Cathedral won the National Book Award. It did not. We regret the error.
