NEW YORK: Poet and author Sonia Sanchez has won a $100,000 lifetime achievement prize. The Academy of American Poets announced on Tuesday that Sanchez is this year’s winner of the Wallace Stevens Award. Sanchez, 83, is known for such collections as Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems. Also on Tuesday, five young poets received fellowships worth more than $25,000 apiece.

On Tuesday, the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Magazine announced this year’s winners of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. The poets are Safia Elhillo, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Sam Sax, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Paul Tran. With prize money totaling $129,000, each will be given $25,800.

The fellowship was started in 1989. Winners must be between age 21 and 31 and the money is meant to give them time to write and study poetry. Work from each of the five winners will appear in the December issue of Poetry Magazine.

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2018