2017 Kingsley Tufts & Kate Tufts Discovery Award Winners Announced

Claremont Graduate University announces that the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award goes to Vievee Francis and the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award goes to Phillip B. Williams. Francis wins the prize for her collection Forest Primeval (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press); Williams, for his collection Thief in the Interior. More:

Claremont Graduate University (CGU) is pleased to announce the selection of Vievee Francis as the recipient of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her poetry collection Forest Primeval (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press).

A poet known for her explorations of racial identity, modernist poetics, and feminist legacies, Francis will receive a $100,000 award during a ceremony held on April 20.

That event, which will be co-sponsored by ALOUD and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, will take place at the Mark Taper Auditorium of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Francis’s Forest Primeval is “an intense work, dark … Dantean … dreamlike in its visions,” said POETRY magazine Editor Don Share, who chaired this year’s Tufts finalist judges committee.

Share and CGU Interim President Jacob Adams phoned Francis to announce the news during a special January 28 reception in Claremont.

"Francis is reclaiming modernist and feminist legacies of poetry, and it takes great courage to do that," Share said after finishing the call with an astonished, elated Francis, "and we can't wait to see where this leads her."

Read more about this year's winners at CGU. Congrats to both winners!