Five Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships in the amount of $25,800 each will be awarded to young U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age through a national competition sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. Submissions will be accepted from March 1 through April 30 of this year.
The original Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships were established in 1989 by Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly to encourage the further study and writing of poetry. In 2013, the Poetry Foundation received a generous gift from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund to create the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, which increased the fellowship amount from $15,000 to $25,800.
The Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships honor two extraordinary women and their commitment to poetry and give five young poets a more auspicious start to their careers. The awards are among the largest offered to young poets in the United States.
“From Harriet Monroe’s founding of Poetry in 1912 to our constant search for fresh new voices today, Poetry has always discovered work that enlivens our sense of what poetry is worth and what it can do,” says Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “The Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships are especially inspiring because they identify emerging writers whose promising work shows how poetry helps compose our lives.”
For information on how to submit, visit poetryfoundation.org/foundation/prizes_fellowship. The fellowship winners will be announced in September 2015 and featured in an upcoming issue of Poetry magazine.
The 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows are Wendy Xu, Hannah Gamble, Solmaz Sharif, Danez Smith and Ocean Vuong. The Poetry Foundation’s annual awards to poets include the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, and the new $7,500 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, first given in 2014, which honors the best book-length works of criticism published in the prior calendar year, including biographies, essay collections and critical editions that consider the subject of poetry or poets.
