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The Academy of American Poets announced on September 19 that Sarah Lawrence faculty member Afaa Michael Weaver has won the Wallace Stevens Award, a prestigious honor given annually to recognize “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Recipients for the award are nominated and elected by the Academy’s Board of Chancellors, and the honor comes with a $100,000 stipend.
“It is such an honor to receive this award,” said Weaver, “and to know what I’ve been trying to do for most of life is not only understood, but appreciated.”
A prolific poet, playwright, and translator, Weaver is the author of numerous poetry collections, including A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press, 2023). He is the recipient of the May Sarton Award, a Pew Fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship, and the Gold Friendship Medal from the Beijing Writers’ Association. Weaver was the first African American poet to serve as Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, and he held an endowed chair at Simmons College for 20 years. He has been a member of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA Writing faculty since 2018.
In announcing Weaver as the winner of the Wallace Stevens Award, Academy Chancellor Kwame Dawes said: “For over three decades, Afaa Michael Weaver has quietly and without fanfare put together a tremendous body of work that has allowed us to see the America of the last half century in all its upheavals and transformations as it contends with the meaning of freedom and justice. He combines his rootedness in the African American poetic with a fierce commitment to the idea of belonging despite America’s long history of willfully deferring the dream of liberty, to, in effect, compel the nation to expand its understanding of itself and to embrace a more capacious sense of its constitution. And in so doing, Weaver has achieved something that only a few poets, most notably Joseph Millard and Philip Levine, have in the last few decades, which is to engage the idea of a working-class sensibility, not as a limitation, but as an opportunity to create art of depth, sophistication, and spiritual power. Afaa Michael Weaver is a major and necessary American voice.”