Yale Library awards 2 prizes honoring the highest achievement in American poetry

With its two prestigious literary awards, Yale Library celebrates the poets Arthur Sze and Major Jackson and their exceptional contributions to the field of American poetry.

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze, the winner of the 54th Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, is a poet, translator, and editor. The Bollingen Prize recognizes Sze’s lifetime achievement in the field.

Sze is the author of 12 books of poetry and the recipient of numerous literary awards, grants, and nominations. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sze is professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he resides.

“Each of Arthur Sze’s poems makes a precise constellation of disparate elements, a balancing of realms—thought, spiritual, physical,” the judging committee wrote when making its award. “Sze is a deeply philosophical word scientist; every increment of livingness has weight: history, experience, and sound. The lines move between the microscopic and the cosmic. The poem is a universe of unexpected juxtapositions—a droplet, a lichen, a bird, to create a fresh world: ‘all situations reside here.’

“Sze’s aural attention to image produces an ethics of lyrical wisdom. He has mentored some of the most brilliant young poets in this country though his generous teaching. Each of Arth Sze’s poems is a pathway to the impossible.”

Sze’s most recent book of poems “Into the Hush” and the collection “The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems” will be published on April 1, 2025.

Throughout its long history, the Bollingen Prize has recognized and honored the best in American poetry. Recipients have included Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and many others. The 2025 Bollingen Prize includes a cash award of $175,000.

See all past Bollingen Prize winners.

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the first recipient of the newly created Patricia Cannon Willis Prize for American Poetry. This book prize recognizes Jackson for his collection “Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022,” published by W. W. Norton in 2023. The prize includes a cash award of $25,000.

“Major Jackson’s poems punch through an age of violent shifts with a poetry of exuberance and hope. The nimble mind in ‘Razzle Dazzle’ is attuned to the pressures of a self in transformation,” the judges wrote. “Every poem is a beloved relative in a room of rowdy history. The poems find lift in transition even as they defy limitation through their enormous linguistic imagination and spectacle.”

Jackson is the author of five additional books of poetry and a collection of prose. He has also edited poetry anthologies and collections and has won numerous prizes and fellowships. His poems and essays have been widely published in literary magazines and journals, including “The New Yorker” and “The Paris Review.”

Jackson, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is also the poetry editor of “Harvard Review” and is the host of the award-winning podcast “The Slowdown.”

The Patricia Cannon Willis Prize, created in 2025, honors literary historian, scholar, and rare book and manuscript curator Patricia Cannon Willis, former curator at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She served as director of the Bollingen Prize for more than 20 years. 

The Bollingen and Willis Prizes, awarded every two years, are administrated by the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) at Beinecke Library.

Read more about the Patricia Cannon Willis Prize and the Bollingen Prize.

The judges

The Bollingen and Willis prize winners are selected by a single panel of three judges. This year’s judges were Joy Harjo, Sandra Lim, and Karin Roffman.

Author of more than 10 books of poetry—and plays, children’s books, and memoirs—Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served as the 23rd poet laureate of the United States from 2019 to 2022. Her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Harjo was the 2023 winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

Sandra Lim’s latest book of poetry is The Curious Thing. Her previous collections include “Loveliest Grotesque” and “The Wilderness,” which Louise Glück selected as the winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Lim has received the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, Pushcart Prizes, and the Levis Reading Prize. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing.

Karin Roffman is the author of “The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life,” the first biography of John Ashbery, which the “New York Times” named as one of the 100 notable books for 2017. Roffman is at work on a full biography of John Ashbery and planning a biography of the American painter Jane Freilicher. In 2019, in collaboration with the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab, she released “John Ashbery’s Nest,” a virtual tour and website about Ashbery’s Hudson house. Her first book, “From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries,” was about the poetry and prose of Edith Wharton, Marianne Moore, Nella Larsen, and Ruth Benedict.

—Deborah Cannarella

Images: Photo of Arthur Sze by Sharlett Bravo; photo of Major Jackson by Beowulf Sheehan