Arthur Sze to Receive 2024 Bobbitt Poetry Prize
The Library of Congress will award the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry to National Book Award winner Arthur Sze for lifetime achievement in poetry. The biennial prize comes with a $10,000 purse. Sze will receive the prize at a December 5 event in the Mumford Room of the Library’s Madison Building in Washington, D.C., and give a short talk on poetry followed by a moderated discussion with Rob Casper, the Library’s head of poetry and literature. The event is free, and registration is open to the public.
“In 11 books and over more than 50 years, Arthur Sze has developed a signature lyricism of seeing. His poems focus on images and declarations—but they also move through breathtaking juxtapositions, create layers of fragments that open up rather than direct their readers,” the prize committee wrote in its citation. “Sze’s imaginative capaciousness pulls in languages, traditions and systems from both East and West, and it can speak to the cosmos then turn to the smallest natural detail.”
Correction: The 2024 Bobbitt Poetry Prize ceremony will be held on December 5, not December 4.
