Today we send our heartiest congratulations to Evie Shockley, recently named the 2023 winner of the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, as chosen by judges Mary Jo Bang and Monica Youn. Created at the behest of Mary P. Sears in 1930, the Shelley Award "recognizes poetic genius and is bestowed upon one distinguished American poet each year."
The Poetry Society of America's announcement begins by acknowledging that Shockley "thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon." The Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, Shockley "has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has appeared internationally." It continues, listing honors including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award, along with "her joys [which] include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with like-minded artists across media."
The judges' citation is unstinting in its praise:
Evie Shockley’s work is imbued with a particular kind of tenderness, for the world and for the self in the world. It’s a savvy tenderness wedded to a type of vigilance that continually tracks the lines of the political and the personal, documenting where they meet and where they later separate again. There is, as well, a keen recognition of how prosody can heighten the reader’s awareness of the fact that what is in front of them on the page has been curated so that the complexity of the presentation will echo the complexity of the human actions that make up the moral universe of the poem.Each of Shockley’s poems is a document that says: I was here, and you were here, and together, we comprise an entity that occupied this moment. In that togetherness, there is hope, although hope forever tempered by the awareness that change is slow and sometimes illusive.
You can explore more than a decade's worth of recordings on PennSound's Evie Shockley author page, starting from a 2005 appearance on the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics (her first of two), and including readings for the Segue Series, Belladonna,* and Penn State University, plus several conference panels, and a pair of MLA Offsite readings. Click here to start listening.
