Poet Afaa Michael Weaver wins $100,000 award for lifetime achievement

NEW YORK (AP) — Poet Afaa Michael Weaver has won the Wallace Stevens Award, a lifetime achievement honor presented by the Academy of American Poets. Weaver, whose books include “Spirit Boxing,” “A Fire in the Hills” and “City of Eternal Spring,” will receive $100,000.

The Stevens prize was among many American Poets Prizes announced Tuesday by the academy, which was founded in 1934.

Major Jackson, who just published the collection “Razzle Dazzle,” was given the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. It includes a $25,000 stipend and a residency at the T.S. Eliot summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Ama Codjoe’s “Bluest Nude” won the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for best poetry book of 2022, and Moira Egan’s translation of Italian poet Giorgiomaria Cornelio’s “Letters of Black Fire” won the Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship, also a $25,000 honor.

“The Academy commits more than $1.3 million each year to support poets in a myriad of ways - from funding vibrant community projects by laureates across the nation to launching first books by aspiring poets, and honoring distinguished lifetime achievements by masters of the art form,” Tess O’Dwyer, the academy’s board chair said in a statement.

A $1,000 prize for most promising young poet, age 23 and under, was awarded to Edgar Morales for his poem “Swim.” Stephanie McCarter won a $1,000 prize for her translation from the Latin of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and poet Margarita Pintado Burgos’ and translator Alejandra Quintana Arocho’s “Ojo en Celo” (“Eye in Heat”) won a $1,000 prize for a poetry manuscript written in Spanish and translated into English.