The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of American (Hungarian-born) publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and is administered by Columbia University in New York City. The award in poetry was established in 1922.
Awards are made by majority vote of 17 Board members, but the Board is also empowered to vote 'no award,' or by three-fourths vote to select an entry that has not been nominated or to switch nominations among the categories. If the Board is dissatisfied with the nominations of any jury, it can ask the Administrator to consult with the chair to ascertain if there are other worthy entries.
Deliberations begin in the beginning of every calendar year and winners are typically announced in mid-April.
For further information please see The Pulitzer Prizes website.
A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal." Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
The poems in this unusual book tell a story, forming a narrative almost like a realistic novel. Read in sequence as intended, they tell of the lives of a married black couple (not unlike Dove's own grandparents) from the early part of the century until their deaths in the 1960s, a period that spans the great migration of blacks from rural south to urban north. But this is merely the social backdrop to the story of a marriage. Two separate sequences offer two views of the couple's lives: the first, "Mandolin," consists of 23 poems giving Thomas's side, and "Canary in Bloom" gives Beulah's in 21 poems. Together they paint a detailed, poetically dense portrait of two lives in all their frailty, dignity and complexity. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987.
A twelfth collection by the 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry finds a temporarily freed Sisyphus struggling through twenty-first century America and nineteenth-century novelists visiting the author's South Jersey towns.
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