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The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Be With, by Forrest Gander (New Directions)

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

Forrest Gander accepts the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

Be With

By

Forrest Gander

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”

-- from the publisher

Biography

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. Trenchant periods of his life were spent in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With degrees in both geology and English literature, Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. He’s the A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A U.S. Artists Rockefeller fellow, Gander has been recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner and Whiting foundations. His 2011 collection Core Samples from the World was an NBCC and Pulitzer Prize finalist for 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.

Jos Charles

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

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