Cultural Front: January 2022

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Calculating lost in contemporary black poetry

Whenever I post a list of African American poets who've won prizes, fellowships, and special appointments, folks are understandably led to pay attention to all that winning. But there's another side: losing. The subjects of losing and debt deserve more attention in histories of black poetry.

It's difficult, though, since non-winning nominees for awards are often not publicly disclosed. We also do not have ways of tracking the thousands of poets who have entered MFA programs over the last thirty years, picked up considerable debt, and are still, years later, struggling to pay off loans with no gainful employment in their fields.

So we have this fascinating paradox: more than ever before, black poets are winning and losing.

On the issue of losing, let's do some estimates...

Every year between 1999 and 2021 (exceprt 2008), Cave Canem awarded a prize for a poetry manuscript. Let's assume, conservatively, that 20 poets entered the competition each year. So we're talking roughly 420 poets. During that same time period, the National Book Award (N. B. A.) Foundation and the Pulitzer Foundation bestowed awards. Let's say that 15 black poets, again conservatively, were nominated. So 345 for the N. B. A. and 345 for the Pulitzer. So with those three awards, we'd have 1,110 nominations.

During that time, we had 22 Cave Canem winners, 7 N. B. A. winnders, and 5 Pulitzer winners. So 34 black winners or 3% of the total 1,110 nominations. Put another away, 97% of black poet nomiees for those three prizes did not win.

Friday, January 14, 2022

A few notes on awards and black poetry

For years now, I've tracked awards, prizes, fellowships, and special appointments earned by black poets. I recently provided an update with awards by title as well as a list of recipients 1987-2021.

There's more work to do, but for now I took a look at 246 total awards and prizes won by 120 poets. There are 32 different awards on the list I'm currently considering.

64 of the poets are men, who are the recipients of 129 of the awards.

54 of the poets are women, who are recipients of 114 of the awards.

2 of the poets are nonbinary, who are recipients of 3 of the awards.

Here are the top six organizations that granted awards:

Guggenheim Fellowship (31 awards)
Cave Canem Poetry Prize (22)
Whiting Award (22)
Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships (19)
Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for poetry (15)
NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry (13)

Increasing numbers of black poets have won major awards since 2000. To take one example, three black poets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in the 20th century, and already five black poets have won the prize in the 21st century. How do we account for the increase in black award recipients?

Several factors come into play. First, and of course, there's so much good writing out there. Yet, I want to quickly add that many black poets have been really good writers for many decades. So why relatively few awards back in the day? That's where some new factors come into play.

For one, today instutitions that grant awards are more diverse and accepting of black poets than in the past. They are more accepting in part because they are more diverse.

The Academy of American Poets, for instance, now has, after considerable struggle, a sizable number of black and other non-white poets on the Board of Chancellors, who get to make decisions about recipients. When the Board was all-white, they only selected white recipients. Now that organization has black poets, and they've awarded black poets.

Related, several other organizations such as the Whiting Foundation, Guggenheim Fellowship, National Poetry Series Winner, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, began to bestow more awards to black recipients over the last two decades.

Another factor is there are more awards and thus possibilites to win for black poets today than 20 years ago. Caven Canem began offering its first poetry prize in 1999, and then began an additional one in 2009. In 2007, the NAACP began offering a poetry award, and in the same year, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Foundation began offering a poetry award. Also in 2007, Poets & Writers, Inc. began offering the Jackson Poetry Prize.

Yet another factor, which is a little less visible, is judging. When poets when win awards or when they are finalists, groups hire them to serve as judges. An increase in black poetry judges has understandably contributed to an increase in more diverse recipients.

32 poetry awards, prizes, etc.

Here's a list of 32 poetry awards, prizes, fellowships, special appointments included in my list of recipients.

• Academy of American Poets Fellowship

• Anisfield-Wolf Award for poetry

• Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award

• Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry

• Bollingen Prize for American Poetry

• Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize

• Cave Canem Poetry Prize

• Gish Prize

• Guggenheim Fellowship

• Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for poetry

• Jackson Poetry Prize

• James Laughlin Award

• Kate Tufts Discovery Award

• Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

• Lannan Literary Award for Poetry

• Lannan Literary Fellowship

• Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

• Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry

• MacArthur Fellowship

• NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry

• National Book Award for Poetry

• National Book Critics Circle Award

• National Poetry Series Winner

• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

• Robert Frost Medal

• Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships

• Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

• Stegner Fellowship

• US Poet Laureate

• Wallace Stevens Award

• Whiting Award

• Yale Series of Younger Poets award

African American recipients of poetry prizes, awards (1987-2021)

Here's a partial list of awards, prizes, and fellowships that poets earned since 1987. See here, for a list by award, prize, or fellowship title.

[More on Prizes and awards in African American poetry]

1987: Rita Dove (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)

1987: Ai (American Book Award)
1987: Etheridge Knight (American Book Award)
1989: Gwendolyn Brooks (Robert Frost Medal)
1989: Askia M. Touré (American Book Award)
1989: Audre Lorde (American Book Award)
1990: M. NourbeSe Philip (Guggenheim)
1990: Thylias Moss (National Poetry Series Winner)
1991: Thylias Moss (Whiting Award)
1991/92: Lucille Clifton (Shelley Memorial Award)
1992: Marilyn Nelson (Anisfield-Wolf Award)
1992: Allison Joseph (John C. Zacharis First Book Award)
1992: Kevin Yooung (Stegner Fellowship)
1992: Derek Walcott (Nobel Prize for Literature)
1993: Cyrus Cassells (Lannan Literary Award for Poetry)
1993: Cornelius Eady (Guggenheim Fellowship)
1993: Kevin Young (National Poetry Series Winner)
1993: Nathaniel Mackey (Whiting Award)
1993: Eugene B. Redmond (American Book Award)
1993: Essex Hemphill (Pew Fellowship in the Arts)
1994: Yusef Komunyakaa (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
1994: Yusef Komunyakaa (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award)
1995: Thylias Moss (Guggenheim Fellowship)
1995: Cyrus Cassells (William Carlos Williams Award)

A selection of responses from 300 black students about challenges during the pandemic

I continually do surveys and conduct an ongoing oral history project so that I can chart what undergraduates are thinking and the language they are using to describe their experiences and feelings. It's important to keep the perspectives of black students in conversations. You'd be surprised how absent black student voices are in discussions concerning black students and diversity.

In December 2021, I asked approximately 330 black students from SIUE what they thought one of the most important challenges to consider as we continued to deal with life during a pandemic. An overwhelming majority of students pointed to mental health as a major concern, and they also noted other related topics.

Below is a selection of responses grouped into five categories: racism, mental health, lack of interaction, lack of motivation, difficulties learning, and other.

Racism

• One of the most important challenges we black students face is racism. It's all across this campus and everywhere in the world. SIUE needs to diversify the institution more and educate everyone about racism.–E. K.

• Racism happens to be a big problem when going to a PWI, we deal with people from all over the world and with different types of home training. It's almost impossible to stop because racism doesn't just come from one person it's passed down from generation to generation. –A. M.

• Being at a PWI itself is a challenge. As African Americans, we feel unsafe or unwanted here. We don’t have many programs or much to represent us. So it’s hard for us to show who we are and what we are capable of. –R. S.

• One of the challenges we face is finding people like us to relate to. We are a minority as a whole in America, and this school is predominately Muzungu [a Swahili term for wandering white people] so it’s hard. Another challenge is subtle racism/microaggressions. --O. D.

Mental health

• Personally I feel our mental health, as African Americans, should be more looked upon in college, especially since we’re new to this whole pandemic ordeal. I feel everyone should play a part in making everyone comfortable. --C. J.

• S.: From my experience, one of the most important challenges of discussion should be the mental health and resources for students who are mothers. The pandemic has at times called for student mothers to be teachers of advancing methodology that's unfamiliar while submitting themselves to unfamiliar information and subject matters. While this reduced to mere responsibility, it carries great weight when having to be done in the context of heightened fears, fatigue of already short attention spans, and the absence of the time that would normally be a break for the mother. The exhaustion from that and not having resources to show understanding of our plight and provide some sort of strategy or boost proves to be difficult and unseen. --J. S.

• I would say the most prominent problems amongst black students especially during this pandemic is mental health, social skills, and financial stability. I can say from experience that the pandemic was very mentally straining on me. In the beginning of the pandemic I never left my room, let alone my bed. I was 4 hours away from my friends and I was just very down and lost all motivation for school. –B. B.