Jackson Poetry Prize Honors Fady Joudah
In April, Poets & Writers named Fady Joudah as the 2024 recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, an award bestowed annually by Poets & Writers to recognize an American poet of exceptional talent.
The prize, named for the John and Susan Jackson family, was established in 2006 with a major gift from the Liana Foundation, which created an endowment to support the prize. As the value of the endowment has grown, so has the amount of the award, which this year reached $100,000, making it among the most generous prizes granted to an American poet.
The Jackson Poetry Prize was first given in 2007, making Joudah the eighteenth poet to receive the honor. Many of the prior winners have gone on to receive additional recognition, including the inaugural recipient Elizabeth Alexander, who was selected to read at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, in 2009; Claudia Rankine (2014), who was named a MacArthur fellow in 2016; Patricia Spears Jones (2017), who was appointed New York State poet laureate in 2023; Joy Harjo (2019), who was named U.S. poet laureate the same year she received the prize; Carl Phillips (2021), who received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Sonia Sanchez (2022), who won the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
There is no application process for the Jackson Poetry Prize; poets are nominated by an anonymous panel of their peers, selected by Poets & Writers. Those who have served as judges are among America’s most distinguished poets. This year the judges were Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, and Diane Seuss.
Fady Joudah is the author of six collections of poems, including […] (2024), Tethered to Stars (2021), and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018), published by Milkweed Editions; and Textu (2014) and Alight (2013), both from Copper Canyon Press. His first book, The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008), was selected by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2007. Joudah has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic, including Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (Yale University Press, 2013), for which he won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and two by Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), for which he won the PEN USA Literary Award in 2010, and The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006). Joudah is the coeditor and cofounder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Series and Prize. He lives in Houston, where he practices internal medicine.
In naming Joudah the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize recipient, Diaz, Pardlo, and Seuss wrote a citation that commends 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.” The citation further states:
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.”
On September 17, Poets & Writers will host a reading by Joudah, who will be joined in conversation by poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the podcast Poetry Unbound. The reading will take place at the Greene Space in New York City and will be live streamed for remote viewers. To find ticket information and register for the live stream, visit pw.org/JacksonPrize.