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The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Olio, by Tyehimba Jess (Wave Books)

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.

Tyehimba Jess accepts the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Olio from Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger.

Winning Work

Olio

By

Tyehimba Jess

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

-- from the publisher

 

Biography

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Olio, his second collection, was published by Wave Books in April 2016. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2017:

Campbell McGrath

For a poetry collection, dazzling in ambition and sweep, leading readers on a tour of the 20th century that is both objective and personal, private and shared.

the late Adrienne Rich

For a musically crafted life’s work that remains as boldly relevant today as when it was written.

The Jury

Jane Hirshfield(Chair)

poet

Wesley McNair

Poet Laureate of Maine

Gregory Pardlo*

Assistant Professor of English

Winners in Poetry

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.
2014

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.
2013

Sharon Olds

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

2017 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

C. J. Chivers

For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD.
Commentary

Peggy Noonan

For rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.
Criticism

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.
Editorial Writing

Art Cullen

For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.
See All 2017 Winners