We close out this week by celebrating PennSound poets
Elizabeth Willis and
Dorianne Laux, who were both named this week to
the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. In their announcement of this year's preliminary list of nominees, the National Book Foundation touted the diversity and pedigree of the included poets, noting that it "includes poets in all stages of their publishing careers, and nine of the ten poets on the Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees," among them "five Guggenheim Fellows and two Pulitzer Prize winners" as well as winners of "the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prizes, and more." It's also worth consideration that "[f]ive of the books come from independent publishers and two come from university presses, including one publisher that is appearing on the National Book Award Longlists for the first time: Texas Review Press."
Willis is nominated for
Liontaming in America (New Directions), which the citation hailed as a "visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments of the circus and its timeless disciplinary displays" and "investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century religious community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life." On
Willis' PennSound author page you can browse a wide array of recordings spanning three decades, including a great many readings, plus talks, interviews, and appearances on both podcasts and radio programs.
Laux's
Life on Earth was praised by the judges for the way in which the collection "tenderly examines the quotidian — a shovel and rake, Bisquick, salt, and even a can of WD-40 — alongside motherhood, aging, and loss." They continue, observing how
Life on Earth "reflects on the many delights and heartbreaks of life, compels us to embrace the abundant beauty of the natural world, and, perhaps most importantly, invites us to consider that even the most ordinary aspects of our messy humanity can be worthy of poetry."
Laux's PennSound author page is far more modest that Willis', but you'll find both a 1999 reading at our own Kelly Writers House there, along with a 1994 panel discussion at San Francisco State University, "The Whole Matter of the Human: Voicing Difference in Poetry," which also included
Ben Hollander, Tino Villanueva, Jane Miller, and Cyrus Cassells.
We congratulate both Willis and Laux, along with their fellow longlisted poets: Anne Carson, Fady Joudah, Gregory Pardlo, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Octavio Quintanilla, m.s. RedCherries, Dianne Seuss, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Finalists will be announced on October 1st and the winner will be crowned in exactly two months at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 20th.
