Fady Joudah wins $100,000 Jackson Poetry Prize

“Distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable,
in poems of lyric concision and intensity.”

Poets & Writers announced today that Fady Joudah has won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, which this year carries an increased award of $100,000. Given annually by Poets & Writers to recognize an American poet of exceptional talent, the prize is endowed by a gift from the Liana Foundation and is named for the John and Susan Jackson family. There is no application process; poets are nominated by a panel of their peers, selected by Poets & Writers, who remain anonymous. Those who have served as judges are among America’s most distinguished poets. Find a full list of prior winners and judges here. Joudah, the eighteenth winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize, is the author six collections of poems, most recently […].

Joudah was selected by three esteemed judges: the poets Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, and Diane Seuss. In identifying Joudah as this year’s winner, the judges issued the following citation:

The Jackson Poetry Prize celebrates Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah’s significant and evolving body of work, distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable, in poems of lyric concision and intensity. “I write for the future,” Joudah tells us, “because my present is demolished.” From the epicenter of that devastation, Joudah resists via the potent image, the senses, and the network of feelings, conjuring the smile of a child rescued from a bombed-out home, and two siblings who liberate their fish “from the rubble of airstrikes”—speaking of and from the “collaterals” of war. Joudah’s diction is slippery, elucidating the instability of language in bearing what cannot be borne. This slippage echoes, as well, the fragility of selfhood, and of love, in the face of such annihilation. He demands love poems from a world so adept at withholding love. The current historical moment gives Joudah’s most recent poems particular urgency, though his body of work has consistently explored mortality, the poem’s capacity to archive the living and the dead, and to transform borders into thresholds. Joudah’s lyric gift generates a transcendence into unity, “From womb / to breath, and one / with oneness // I be: / from the river / to the sea.”

The Jackson Poetry Prize has been awarded each year since 2007. Thanks to a generous endowment provided by the Liana Foundation, the amount of the award has grown to $100,000, making it among the most generous awards offered to an American poet. The award has often led to additional recognition for the recipients.

The first recipient was Elizabeth Alexander, who was later selected to read at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Others have included Claudia Rankine (2014), who was named a McArthur Fellow in 2016; Patricia Spears Jones (2017), who was appointed New York State Poet in 2023; Joy Harjo (2019), who was named United States Poet Laureate that same year; Carl Phillips (2021), who received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Sonia Sanchez (2020), who received the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. There is no application process; poets are nominated by a panel of their peers, selected by Poets & Writers, who remain anonymous. Those who have served as judges are among America’s most distinguished poets.

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