Claremont Graduate University in California has announced five finalists for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, is given annually to a mid-career poet. The winner will be announced in March and honored at a ceremony on April 7.
Three of the five finalists are African American men.
Kyle Dargan is an associate professor in the department of literature and director of the creative writing program at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the founding editor of Post No Ills magazine and is the former managing editor of Callaloo. Dargan is being honored for his poetry collection Honest Engine (University of Georgia Press, 2015). A graduate of the University of Virginia, Dargan holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Indiana University.
Ross Gay teaches in the creative writing program at Indiana University and for the low-residency master of fine arts degree program in poetry at Drew University in New Jersey. He is being honored for his collection Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), which is also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the poetry category. Dr. Gay is a native of Youngstown, Ohio. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Dr. Gay earned a master of fine arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and a Ph.D. in American literature from Temple University in Philadelphia.
Fred Moten is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is being honored for his poetry collection The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). Professor Moten is also the author of several books including In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Dr. Moten is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Update: On March 2, Ross Gay was named the winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
