Afaa Michael Weaver is the winner of the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award given by Claremont Graduate University to a mid-career poet so that they “can continue working towards the pinnacle of their craft.” The award comes with a $100,000 prize.
Weaver, a professor at Simmons College in Boston, is the author of 12 collections of poetry including his latest work, The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
A native of Baltimore, Weaver spent two years at the University of Maryland before dropping out and going to work in a factory. After 15 years in factory work, he went back to school and earned a bachelor’s degree from Excelsior College and a master of fine arts degree at Brown University.
Before joining the Simmons College faculty in 1998, Weaver was a tenured professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
