PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
To a poet whose distinguished collection of poetry represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.
Winner: Load in Nine Times, Frank X Walker (Liveright, 2024)
From the judges’ citation: “American history is riddled with irony we can neither escape nor avoid. If anything, our history comes looking for us to atone and to guide our struggles through the present. The poems in Load in Nine Times vividly imagine the voices of Americans born into slavery who suddenly found themselves enlisted as the first colored troops to fight for the Union Army. The result illuminates the individual characters and their particular history, but the book also renders a collective, a chorus singing lament and resilience down through the ages. That the end of the Civil War did little to end the struggle for true freedom is yet another irony this book probes with candor, through poems that exercise formal dexterity and invention. The shadows that these brave men, women and children cast in their own time are still falling on our nation. Frank X Walker’s art humanizes our pain and our hope. The eloquence of this book is wrenching, beautiful, and true.”
Watch the Ceremony here:
