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The 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Tripas: Poems, by Brandon Som (Georgia Review Books)

A collection that deeply engages with the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working lives, creating community rather than conflict.

Brandon Som accepts the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry from Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

Tripas: Poems

By

Brandon Som

Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry

With Tripas, Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem’s ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of “telephone” between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise—one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale.

Biography

Brandon Som received his Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, and an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Tribute Horse, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon, winner of the Snowbound Prize. He was the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College, and was awarded fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Civitella Ranieri. His teaching and writing interests include 20th- and 21st century poetry, transpacific literature, Asian-American and Chicanx poetry, citational poetics, and sound studies.

Selected Publications:

The Tribute Horse. Nightboat Books. Winner of Kate Tufts Discovery Award. 2015. Finalist for the Pen Center USA Literary Award. 2015.

Babel’s Moon. Winner of Snowbound Chapbook Award. Tupelo Press. 2011.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2024:

Jorie Graham

A fluent yet spare volume about grief, loss and vulnerability through an array of themes, including environmental disaster and personal mortality.

Robyn Schiff

Poetry that chronicles the oddities, indignities, and wonders of working at a museum, a vivid compendium of musings on the nature of art and its creation.

The Jury

Vijay Seshadri(Chair)*

Professor of Writing, Sarah Lawrence College

Forrest Gander*

Poet, Translator and Novelist, San Francisco

Dana Levin

Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, Maryville University

Roger Reeves

Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin

Pimone Triplett

Professor of English, University of Washington

Winners in Poetry

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.  
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.
See All Poetry

2024 Prize Winners

National Reporting

Staff of Reuters

For an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States.
See All 2024 Winners