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The 2023 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry

Finalist: Blood Snow, by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books)

Poems of deep attention and prismatic intelligence, which render a collapsing biosphere from the perspective of an ancient Arctic culture rooted in community, survival and guardianship.

Nominated Work

Blood Snow

By

dg nanouk okpik 

 

Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2022
Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry

“She/I cast a thick,

sod-wall

time out of mind,

out of sync, off course.”

American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures. Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.

Biography

dg nanouk okpik was born in and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She attended Salish Kootenai College, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale. Her second book, Blood Snow, is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2022.

Winners

Prize Winner in Poetry in 2023:

Carl Phillips

A masterful collection that chronicles American culture as the country struggles to make sense of its politics, of life in the wake of a pandemic, and of our place in a changing global community.   Poetry

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2023:

the late Jay Hopler

A startling and darkly funny collection of sonnets, lyrics, epigrams and songs that produces a jolt of electric joy as the poet grapples with his end-of-life concerns and mortal fears.

The Jury

Stephanie Burt(Chair)

Professor of English, Harvard University

Sherwin Bitsui

Associate Professor of English, Northern Arizona University

Carolyn Forché

Professor of English, Georgetown University

Paisley Rekdal

Distinguished Professor of English, University of Utah

A. Van Jordan

Professor of English, Stanford University

Winners in Poetry

2022

Diane Seuss

A virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt.
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.
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.

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2023 Prize Winners

Commentary

Kyle Whitmire of AL.com, Birmingham

For measured and persuasive columns that document how Alabama's Confederate heritage still colors the present with racism and exclusion, told through tours of its first capital, its mansions and monuments–and through the history that has been omitted.
Investigative Reporting

Staff of The Wall Street Journal

For sharp accountability reporting on financial conflicts of interest among officials at 50 federal agencies, revealing those who bought and sold stocks they regulated and other ethical violations by individuals charged with safeguarding the public’s interest.
See All 2023 Winners