January 14, 2025
Awards

Peter Gizzi was awarded the TS Eliot prize for poetry for Fierce Elegy on Monday, January 13, at an award ceremony in London.

The Guardian reports "Judges for the £25,000 award say the collection, informed by grief for his two brothers, ‘braves large questions’ with its lyric sequence."

The TS Eliot prize is awarded each year to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland.

In a UMass Amherst news article, HFA Dean Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, said, “Professor Gizzi’s poems explore the imagination and the self. They examine love and grief and wrestle with despair, opening for the listener a way into our joys, our sorrows and our songs of self. We are thrilled to have professor Gizzi teaching in the MFA and English department and to offer so many emerging writers the opportunity to work with and learn from him.”  

To learn more about Gizzi receiving the award, visit The Guardian's interview with Gizzi and a review of Fierce Elegy from the Times Literary Supplement.

To learn more about Gizzi's work, visit his faculty profile.