UMass Professor Peter Gizzi Wins 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize

Source: UMass News & Media

University of Massachusetts Amherst professor of poetry Peter Gizzi has received the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection, “Fierce Elegy”.

Gizzi’s work was shortlisted from 187 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. The judges announced Gizzi, Professor of Poetry in the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers program, as the winner on Monday, Jan. 13, at an award ceremony in London.

Chair of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry judges panel, Mimi Khalvati, said of Gizzi’s work, “We are delighted to welcome and honor a work that is infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully alive in body and spirit. Written in the afterlife of grief, Peter Gizzi’s ‘Fierce Elegy’ brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty.”

The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, is considered the most valuable and prestigious prize in the United Kingdom for a new collection of poetry. It is distinctive among poetry prizes for being judged by a panel of established poets. The winner receives £25,000 (approximately $30,500).

Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Dean of the UMass Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts, said, “Professor Gizzi’s poems explore the imagination and the self. They examine love and grief and wrestle with despair, opening for the listener a way into our joys, our sorrows and our songs of self. We are thrilled to have Professor Gizzi teaching in the MFA and English department and to offer so many emerging writers the opportunity to work with and learn from him.”            

Gizzi, a native of Alma, Michigan, is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including: “Now It’s Dark” (Wesleyan, 2020); “Archeophonics” (Wesleyan, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award; “Threshold Songs” (Wesleyan, 2012); among others. In 2018 his work was the subject of “In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi” (Wesleyan).

Gizzi’s honors include a number of awards and fellowships. He was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and has twice been the recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. 

Video of Gizzi reading “Findspot Unknown” can be found on the T.S. Eliot website:
https://tseliot.com/prize/the-t-s-eliot-prize-2024/videos/#peter-gizzi