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For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Digest, by Gregory Pardlo (Four Way Books)

Clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.
Mike Pride, Lee Bollinger and Gergory Pardlo

Mike Pride, Pulitzer Prize Administrator (left) and Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University (center), present the 2015 Poetry Prize to Gregory Pardlo.

Winning Work

Digest

Digest

From Epicurus to Sam Cook, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.

-- from the publisher

Biography

Gregory Pardlo’s first book, Totem, received the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. An associate editor of Callaloo, he is currently a teaching fellow in Undergraduate Writing at Columbia University. Pardlo is currently writing his dissertation for the PhD in English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2015:

Alan Shapiro

Finely crafted poems with a composure that cannot conceal the troubled terrain they traverse.

Arthur Sze

A collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world.

The Jury

Bonnie Costello(Chair )

professor of English and American literature

Cornelius Eady

professor of literature and writing

David Orr

poetry columnist

Winners in Poetry

Vijay Seshadri

A compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.

Sharon Olds

A book of unflinching poems on the author's divorce that examine love, sorrow and the limits of self-knowledge.

Tracy K. Smith

A collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain.

Kay Ryan

A body of work spanning 45 years, witty, rebellious and yet tender, a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind.

2015 Prize Winners

Anthony Doerr

An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.

Julia Wolfe

A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.

Stephen Adly Guirgis

A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.

David I. Kertzer

An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.