The Poetry Foundation has awarded Alice Notley the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which recognizes the outstanding lifetime achievement of a living U.S. poet.
The $100,00 award, one of the richest literary prizes in the country, will be presented to Notley at a ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on June 8.
Notley is the author of more than 25 books of poetry, including How Spring Comes (1981), Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Disobedience (2001), which was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize; and Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (2006), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
“The range, comprehensiveness, and empathetic imagination of Alice Notley’s poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry,” says Robert Polito, president of the Poetry Foundation. “Book by surprising book, she reinvents not only herself as a poet, but also what it means for anyone to write a poem at this volatile moment in our history.”
