The Academy of American Poets announced the winners of nine American Poets Prizes for 2018. Among the winners is Sonia Sanchez, who received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award, and Martín Espada, who won the $25,000 American Academy of Poets Fellowship. And Publishers Weekly’s director of special editorial projects, Craig Teicher, was awarded the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
The rest of the winners included poets Geffrey Davis ($5,000 James Laughlin Award), Anthony Molino ($10,000 Raizss/de Palchi Book Prize), David Larsen ($1,000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award), Raquel Salas Rivera ($1,000 Ambroggio Prize for a Spanish work in English), John Bosworth ($1,000 Promising Young Poet Award), and Emily Skaja ($5,000 Walt Whitman First Book Award).
Sanchez, a much-acclaimed African American poet, writer, and black activist, began publishing in the 1960s and has produced more than 12 books of poetry, in addition to plays, children’s books, and anthologies. Her honor, the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award, recognizes “outstanding and proven mastery of the art of poetry,” according to the Academy of American Poets board of chancellors.
Espada, who has published nearly 20 books of poetry, was awarded the $25,000 American Academy of Poets Fellowship for “distinguished poetic achievement.” Teicher's honor, the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, was for his 2017 collection The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions), which the Academy recognized as that year's “most outstanding poetry collection published in the U.S.”
CORRECTION: This article initially misspelled the name of poet Martín Espada.
