Joy Harjo receives $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Poet Joy Harjo, known for wedding social consciousness to her Muskogee Creek heritage and the Southwest America landscape, has won a $100,000 prize for lifetime achievement.

Harjo, 64, received the Wallace Stevens Award for “proven mastery,” the Academy of American Poets announced Thursday. The academy praised Harjo for her “visionary justice-seeking art” and for transforming “bitterness to beauty” and “trauma to healing.”

Her books include “How We Became Human” and “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.”

Previous winners of the Stevens prize include W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich.

Also Thursday, the academy awarded Kevin Young’s “Book of Hours” the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the year’s best collection and a $25,000 fellowship to poet Marie Howe.

Kathyrn Nuernberger’s “The End of Pink” won a $1,000 prize for the best second book of poetry, and Blake N. Campbell received a $1,000 award for student poetry for his work “Bioluminescence.”

The academy announced two translation awards. Todd Portnowitz received a $25,000 prize and five-week residency at the American Academy in Rome for his work on Italian poet Pierluigi Cappello’s “Go Tell It To the Emperor.” Roger Greenwald’s English-language edition of the Swedish poet Gunnar Harding’s “Guarding the Air” brought him a $1,000 prize.

The non-profit academy was founded in 1934.