Skip to main content
The 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry

Finalist: Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems, by Dorianne Laux (W.W. Norton)

Poetic narratives of plainspoken authenticity with characters whose breadth spans the wide range of American life.

Nominated Work

Only as the Day Is Long

By

Dorianne Laux

 

Earthy and lyrical, Only as the Day Is Long draws from Dorianne Laux’s five expansive, award-winning volumes and includes twenty new odes that pay homage to the poet’s mother. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, of sexual love and celebration, Only as the Day Is Long represents a bold and brilliant body of work from a “poet of immense insight and masterful craft” (Kwame Dawes).

-- from the publisher

Biography

Dorianne Laux teaches poetry in the Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University and is a founding faculty member of Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a recipient of the Paterson Prize, she lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

    Winners

    Prize Winner in Poetry in 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. Poetry

    Finalists

    Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2020:

    Mary Ruefle

    Poems of wildness and wit that swerve away from the predictable as they balance comedy and melancholy. 

    The Jury

    Adam Kirsch(Chair)

    Poet and Literary Critic, New York City

    Marilyn Chin

    Poet; Professor Emerita of English, San Diego State University

    Patrick Phillips

    Poet; Professor of English, Stanford University

    Winners in Poetry

    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.
    2016

    Peter Balakian

    Poems that bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.
    See All Poetry

    2020 Prize Winners

    Commentary

    Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times

    For a sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.
    Criticism

    Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times

    For work demonstrating extraordinary community service by a critic, applying his expertise and enterprise to critique a proposed overhaul of the L.A. County Museum of Art and its effect on the institution’s mission.
    See All 2020 Winners