Marianne Boruch, a poet celebrated for her explorations of the natural world and human consciousness, has been awarded the $100,000 Jackson Poetry Prize. The prize, administered by the nonprofit organisation Poets & Writers, recognises exceptional talent in American poetry.
Judges praised Boruch’s work, including collections such as “Bestiary Dark” and “The Anti-Grief”, as affirmations of human creativity in an era of artificial intelligence. The citation released on Wednesday described her poetry as rendering “luminous the expanse and reach of human thought”. It added: “In an age of simulated intelligence, Boruch sets to tremble the whole of our collective knowledge where the soul, as she suggests in several poems, is a vastness of wanting and boundless curiosity.”
Boruch, 75, is a resident of West Lafayette, Indiana, and taught for decades at Purdue University, where she founded the MFA creative writing programme. The Jackson Poetry Prize, established 20 years ago with a gift from the Liana Foundation, has previously been awarded to former US poet laureate Joy Harjo and the current laureate, Arthur Sze.
