Peter Gizzi wins 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of poetry published in 2024
Judges call his work one of “Transcendental beauty.”
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AMHERST, MA. -- The UMass College of Humanities and Fine Arts Department of English Department is thrilled to announce the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize was awarded to MFA faculty member, Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy, published by Penguin Poetry.
Looking for the “best collection of poetry published in 2024,” judges Mimi Khalvati (Chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan chose the Shortlist for T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 from 187 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. The list included seasoned poets, two debuts, two second collections, and two previously shortlisted poets from long established, and small independent presses. The judges announced Gizzi as the prize winner on Monday January 13 at the award ceremony in London. On Sunday January 12, the shortlisted poets read at the Royal Festival Hall, London, the largest annual poetry event in the UK.
Writing about Gizzi’s work, Chair Mimi Khalvati said:
We are delighted to welcome and honor a work that is infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully alive in body and spirit. Written in the afterlife of grief, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty.
Dr. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts said:
The UMass College of Fine Arts and Humanities joins the poetry world in celebrating Prof. Peter Gizzi’s T.S. Eliot Prize. Prof. 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 Prof. Gizzi teaching in the MFA and English department and to offer so many emerging writers the opportunity to work with and learn from him.
Peter Gizzi, Professor of Poetry in the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers, was born in Alma, Michigan. His is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including: Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020); Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award; Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2012); In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (Wesleyan, 2014); and Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet Press 2020). In 2018 his work was the subject of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan).
Gizzi’s honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry (1993), The Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He has twice been the recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.
Videotape of Gizzi reading “Findspot Unknown” is on the T.S. Eliot website: https://tseliot.com/prize/the-t-s-eliot-prize-2024/videos/#peter-gizzi