Dawn Lundy Martin and Diana Khoi Nguyen Awarded Kingsley and Kate Tufts Awards

The Claremont Graduate University announced today their annual Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. We are thrilled to learn Dawn Lundy Martin will take home the 100K Kingsley Tufts for Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press), while Diana Khoi Nguyen will be honored with the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which includes a prize of 10K, for her book Ghost Of (Omnidawn). More from the Claremont Graduate University Press release:

For her creation of “an uncompromising poetics of resistance and exactitude,” Dawn Lundy Martin has been chosen as the winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her collection Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press).

Established in 1992 at Claremont Graduate University (CGU) by Kate Tufts in memory of her husband Kingsley, a Los Angeles shipping executive and poet, the award is given annually in recognition of the work of a mid-career poet. The award includes a cash prize of $100,000.

“I am so honored and thankful,” said a surprised Martin, who was contacted by phone by CGU President Len Jessup, judging committee chair Timothy Donnelly, and interim awards director (and Poetry magazine editor) Don Share during a special “call the winner” dinner held last weekend on campus.

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The committee was similarly moved by Diana Khoi Nguyen, a poet, multimedia artist, and doctoral candidate at the University of Denver, for the “vibrant, sharp, and gorgeous” meditations on the death of her brother in Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing) and the power that such a painful absence still exerts on her family’s life.

Nguyen receives this year’s Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which includes a cash prize of $10,000. A year after establishing the award in her husband’s memory, Kate Tufts established the Discovery award to celebrate the work of a promising new poet. Prior Discovery Award winners include Yona Harvey, Charles Harper Webb, and Beth Bachmann.

This year's judges included Cathy Park Hong, Khadijah Queen, Luis J. Rodriguez, Sandy Solomon, Timothy Donnelly, and our own Don Share. Read more of Dawn's writing here and Diana's here. To find out more about the prize, head here. Congrats to all!