Skip to main content
The 2021 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry

Finalist: In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché (Penguin Press)

Narrative lyrics resonant with imagery of beauty and horror that transcend the personal to offer a larger vision of our global condition.

Nominated Work

In the Lateness of the World

By

Carolyn Forché

“An undisputed literary event.” —NPR

“History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker

Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.

Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

-- from the publisher

Biography

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.

Winners

Prize Winner in Poetry in 2021:

Natalie Diaz

A collection of tender, heart-wrenching and defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict. Poetry

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2021:

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

A book of meditative and expansive poems that illuminate the interconnectedness of life forms and the spirituality of our natural environment.

The Jury

Marilyn Chin(Chair)

Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University

Lee Ann Roripaugh

Professor of English, University of South Dakota

Natasha Trethewey*

Board of Trustees Professor of English, Northwestern University

Winners in Poetry

2020

Jericho Brown

A collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.
2019

Forrest Gander

A collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed.

2018

Frank Bidart

A volume of unyielding ambition and remarkable scope that mixes long dramatic poems with short elliptical lyrics, building on classical mythology and reinventing forms of desires that defy societal norms.
2017

Tyehimba Jess

For a distinctive work that melds performance art with the deeper art of poetry to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.
See All Poetry

2021 Prize Winners

See All 2021 Winners