PSA Announces Annual Award Winners—for the 99th Time

The Poetry Society of America on Friday announced the complete list of winners of the 99th annual PSA Awards—a baker's dozen of prizes ranging from the $250 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award, given to a student in grades nine through twelve, to the prestigious Frost Medal, given for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry. Sixteen-year-old Grace Dunham won the former; seventy-nine-year-old X. J. Kennedy received the latter. 

Among the other winners are Ron Padgett and Gary Young, who two months ago split the Shelley Memorial Award, a prize established way back in 1929 by the will of the late Mary P. Sears. John Koethe, the UWM philosophy professor whose eighth book of poems, Ninety-fifth Street, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in September, and Christopher Buckley were the judges.

Padgett and Young are actually the twelfth pair to share the annual prize. The first was Herbert Bruncken and Winfield T. Scott in 1939. Some other, perhaps more widely known Shelley Award-winning pairs are John Ashbery and Richard Wilbur in 1972 and Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan in 1983.  

In addition to all the poetry collections that Padgett has published with great indie presses over the years, he's written and/or edited books about writing as well as two books about other poets—Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (The Figures, 1993) and Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Coffee House Press, 2004). Young, a prose poet who teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of several poetry collections, including Pleasure (2006) and No Other Life (2005), both published by Heyday Books.