Alice Notley Wins $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Alice Notley has been awarded the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986, the prize recognizes the outstanding lifetime achievement of a living U.S. poet. At $100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation who is also the publisher of Poetry magazine. The award will be presented, along with the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, at a ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 8. The winner of the award for poetry criticism will be announced later this month.

Born in 1945, Alice Notley is recognized as one of America’s greatest living poets. From her Poetry Foundation bio:

She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be “our present-day Homer.”