Fanny Howe & Ange Mlinko Win 2009 Pegasus Awards

Please join me and all the Poetry Foundation staff in congratulating Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko, winners of the sixth annual Pegasus Awards.

Howe is the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation’s largest literary prizes.

Poet and critic Ange Mlinko is the winner of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. Ange Mlinko is the third recipient of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. The $10,000 prize is awarded for poetry criticism that is intelligent and learned as well as lively and enjoyable to read.

The prizes will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago in May.

Fanny Howe, whose poems first appeared in Poetry magazine in 1973, recently discussed her memoir The Winter Sun with Chris Wiman and Don Share in the Poetry magazine March podcast. More of Howe's poetry and prose she's written for Poetry magazine can be found here. You may also read an essay about Howe by Maureen McLane at Boston Review.

Ange Mlinko has published many poems and essays in Poetry magazine. Most recently, her manifesto "The Eighties, Glory Of" appeared in the February 2009 issue. More of her work, including an essay she wrote for this site about the falling out between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov over the Vietnam War, can be found here. Her new-ish column "Lingo" appears in The Nation.