Phillips, Prelutsky Pick Up Poetry Prizes

The Academy of American Poets annnounced earlier this week that Carl Phillips was the recipient of a $25,000 “Academy Fellowship,” awarded annually to a poet at mid-career. Quiver of Arrows, a selection of his work from 1986 to the present, will be published next year by FSG; he has twice been a National Book Award finalist and once for the National Book Critics Circle prize.

Meanwhile, the Poetry Foundation named Jack Prelutsky (left) as the first U.S. children’s poet laureate, which coincidentally also comes with a $25K check (and a medallion). Prelutsky has already conducted an online workshop for elementary school students, sponsored by Scholastic, which encourages kids to start writing their own verse. As he tells the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, sure, his work isn’t accorded the same critical respect as that of poets who write for older audiences, but “the interesting thing about this is children’s poetry sells much better than adult poetry.”

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