Forrest Gander's Be With Wins 2019 Pulitzer Prize

Today, we are elated by the news that Forrest Gander has been honored with the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his collection Be With (New Directions, 2018). The Pulitzer committee describes the book as "[a] collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed." More from the Pulitzer website:

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”

Jos Charles and A.E. Stallings were named as finalists for their collections feeld and Like, respectively. Head to NPR to watch a live stream of the awards and to view other award winners. Congrats to all!