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The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry

Finalist: feeld, by Jos Charles (Milkweed Editions)

A volume of imaginative, idiosyncratic verse that merges contemporary speech with Middle English tradition to interpret the transgender experience.

Nominated Work

feeld

By

Jos Charles

Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Jos Charles’s revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. 

“i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer—making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. 

Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.

-- from the publisher

Biography

Jos Charles is a trans poet, editor, and author of the collection Safe Space. She is the recipient of the 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation and the 2015 Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and currently resides in Long Beach, California.

 

 

Winners

Prize Winner in Poetry in 2019:

Forrest Gander

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

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2019:

A. E. Stallings

A collection of inventive formal poetry that challenges, gives shape to, and delights in how the art form mimics and distorts the universalities of life.

The Jury

Dan Chiasson(Chair)

Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English, Wellesley College; Critic, The New Yorker

Robyn Creswell

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Rigoberto González

Professor of English

Winners in Poetry

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.
2015

Gregory Pardlo

Clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.
See All Poetry

2019 Prize Winners

See All 2019 Winners