Poetry Foundation Announces 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships [Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of "Telepathologies"]

Cortney Lamar Charleston

 

$25,800 fellowship recognizes nation’s most powerful young voices in poetry

September 6, 2017

CHICAGO -- The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are pleased to announce the five recipients of the 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships: Fatimah Asghar, Sumita Chakraborty, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Roy G. Guzmán, and Emily Jungmin Yoon. Among the largest awards offered to young poets in the United States, the $25,800 prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry and is open to all US poets between twenty-one and thirty-one years of age.

“In a year during which some readers have asked ‘Why poetry?’ here are poets whose work not only provides a powerful answer, but demonstrates that the present—and future—of poetry have never been in such fine hands,” says Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “A deviser of an Emmy-nominated web series, a PhD student in East Asian languages and civilizations, a poetry editor and scholar of literature, a graduate of the Wharton School, and a human rights researcher—this year’s Lilly/Rosenberg Fellows are remarkably talented on and off the page, each an embodiment of what Czesław Miłosz meant when he said that poetry ‘is a dividend from what you know and what you are.’”

Established in 1989 by Ruth Lilly, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship program has dramatically expanded since its inception. Until 1995, university writing programs nationwide each nominated one student poet for a single fellowship; from 1996 until 2007, two fellowships were awarded. In 2008, the competition was opened to all US poets between twenty-one and thirty-one years of age, and the number of fellowships increased to five, totaling $75,000. In 2013, the Poetry Foundation received a generous gift from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund to create the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, which increased the fellowship amount from $15,000 to $25,800.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, River Styx, and elsewhere. He is originally from the Chicago suburbs and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. https://www.cortneylamarcharleston.com/

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