Congratulations to the 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellows

Amidst the shocking losses of so many beloved poets lately, we'll take all the good news we can get! Yesterday we highlighted a number of PennSound poets long-listed for two of PEN America's literary awards, and today we follow that with congratulations to three of our poets that were named today as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows. Poetry was well-represented this year, with nine fellows out of a total of one hundred eighty-eight spanning fifty-two fields. The full roster consists of Kaveh Akbar, Jos Charles, Elaine Equi, Vievee Francis, Airea D. Matthews, Robyn Schiff, Safiya Sinclair, Tracy K. Smith, and Mai Der Vang: a dazzling and diverse array of voices spanning from coast to coast.

As always, we're delighted to be able to allow our listeners to connect with the work of the celebrated authors, and you'll find recordings from three of the nine fellows on our site. On Elaine Equi's PennSound author page, you'll find nearly a dozen recordings from 1984 up to the present, including events from the Segue Series, Belladonna* Reading Series, Philadelphia's Chapter & Verse Series, and the Dia Art Foundations' Readings in Contemporary Poetry Series. Airea D. Matthews' PennSound author page is home to two recordings from the Kelly Writers House: a 2019 reading and her 2021 interview with Rachel Zolf. Finally, you can listen to Tracy K. Smith read from her beloved Life on Mars at a March 2013 Brave Testimony event also held at the Writers House. 

We send our enthusiastic congratulations to these poets, and the rest of this year's fellows class, for this well-deserved achievement.