The Jackson Poetry Prize honors an American poet of exceptional talent. It was established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation and is named for the John and Susan Jackson family. Eligible poets must have published at least two books of acknowledged literary merit. The 2024 prize carries a monetary value of $100,000. Nominees are identified by a group of poets selected by Poets & Writers who remain anonymous; final selection is made by a panel of esteemed poets.
The 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize recipient is Fady Joudah. Esteemed poets Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, and Diane Seuss served as judges.
Fady Joudah (Credit: Cybele Knowles)
In selecting Joudah as the eighteenth recipient of the prize, the judges issued the following citation:
The Jackson Poetry Prize celebrates Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah’s significant and evolving body of work, distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable, in poems of lyric concision and intensity. “I write for the future,” Joudah tells us, “because my present is demolished.” From the epicenter of that devastation, Joudah resists via the potent image, the senses, and the network of feelings, conjuring the smile of a child rescued from a bombed-out home, and two siblings who liberate their fish “from the rubble of airstrikes”—speaking of and from the “collaterals” of war. Joudah’s diction is slippery, elucidating the instability of language in bearing what cannot be borne. This slippage echoes, as well, the fragility of selfhood, and of love, in the face of such annihilation. He demands love poems from a world so adept at withholding love. The current historical moment gives Joudah’s most recent poems particular urgency, though his body of work has consistently explored mortality, the poem’s capacity to archive the living and the dead, and to transform borders into thresholds. Joudah’s lyric gift generates a transcendence into unity, “From womb / to breath, and one / with oneness // I be: / from the river / to the sea.”
Poets & Writers will host a reading with Fady Joudah this fall in New York City. Check back here for more information.
To purchase books by Fady Joudah as well as past winners of the Jackson Poetry Prize, visit Bookshop.org.
Past Winners of the Jackson Poetry Prize
2023 - Sandra Lim
Judges: Joy Harjo, Carl Phillips, and John Yau
2022 - Sonia Sanchez
Judges: Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, and Claudia Rankine
2021 - Carl Phillips
Judges: Jericho Brown, Carolyn Forché, and Juan Felipe Herrera
2020 - Ed Roberson
Judges: Nikky Finney, Anne Waldman, Robert Wrigley
2019 - Joy Harjo
Judges: Ada Limón, Alicia Ostriker, D. A. Powell
2018 - John Yau
Judges: Laura Kasischke, Robin Coste Lewis, Arthur Sze
2017 - Patricia Spears Jones
Judges: Henri Cole, Kwame Dawes, Mary Szybist
2016 - Will Alexander
Judges: Elizabeth Alexander, Rae Armantrout, and Terrance Hayes
2015 - X. J. Kennedy
Judges: Heather McHugh, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren
2014 - Claudia Rankine
Judges: Tracy K. Smith, David St. John, and Mark Strand
2013 - Arthur Sze
Judges: Reginald Gibbons, Natasha Trethewey, and C. D. Wright
2012 - Henri Cole
Judges: Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, and James Tate
2011 - James Richardson
Judges: Mark Doty, Rita Dove, and Gerald Stern
2010 - Harryette Mullen
Judges: Fanny Howe, Ted Kooser, and C. K. Williams
2009 - Linda Gregg
Judges: Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, and Charles Simic
2008 - Tony Hoagland
Judges: Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, and Ellen Bryant Voigt
2007 - Elizabeth Alexander
Judges: Lucille Clifton, Stephen Dunn, and Jane Hirshfield