2024 marks Claremont Graduate University's 30th anniversary of the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards—two of the most prestigious prizes given to contemporary poets.

Watch us continue the tradition of surprising our winners by cold calling both the Kate Tufts Discovery and the Kingsley Tufts awards and telling them the good news.

The Kingsley Tufts Award, one of the most lucrative in the field of poetry with a $100,000 prize, honors a book written by a poet in mid-career who already possesses an established body of work. This year's award goes to West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal. West, a collection of poems and essays, translates the elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other railroad workers’ histories, as well as through the railroad’s cultural impact on the United States. You can visit West's complementary website at https://westtrain.org/

The Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which carries a $10,000 prize and recognizes a first book by a poet of unusual promise, went to Jacqui Germain’s poetry collection, Bittering the Wound, a first-person retelling of the events in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
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