This week in our poetry news round up we look at the poet who has been named as one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, and at National Poetry Day, which was celebrated across the UK on Thursday.
Poet Layli Long Soldier Awarded MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship
Photo Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The American poet Layli Long Soldier has been named as one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, an honor that is popularly known as the “genius grant”. The MacArthur Foundation announced its class of 2026 on Tuesday. Twenty people were chosen, working in fields that range from chemistry to choreography, and Long Soldier is the only poet amongst them.
Each fellow receives $800,000, which is paid out over five years and comes with no strings attached. Nobody can apply for the award. Candidates are nominated and chosen without their knowledge, so the news often comes as a complete shock.
Long Soldier, who is 54 and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts before going on to complete a master’s degree at Bard College in 2014. She has taught at a number of colleges, including Diné College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and most recently held the endowed chair of creative writing at Texas State University.
Her reputation rests largely on Whereas, her first full-length collection, which was published by Graywolf Press in 2017. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Its title poem is a response to the official apology to Native Americans that was passed by the US Congress in 2009, and it borrows the stiff legal language of that document in order to pick it apart. Another poem, “38”, looks at the hanging of 38 Dakota men in 1862. In its citation the foundation described her body of work as “widely experimental, yet accessible”.
Long Soldier is also a visual artist, and the two sides of her work often overlap. One series of poems, Obligations, began life as a hanging sculpture in the shape of a Lakota star quilt. The timing of the award could hardly be better, as her second collection, We, is published next week, nine years after her first.
She joins a distinguished line of poets to have been recognized by the foundation. When the very first fellowships were handed out in 1981, the list included Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky, both of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
National Poetry Day Celebrates “Wonder”
Thursday was National Poetry Day in the UK, the annual celebration which has been held on the first Thursday of October ever since it was founded by William Sieghart in 1994. The theme chosen for this year was “Wonder”.
The organizers, the Forward Arts Foundation, expected around 2.1 million children and young people to take part in their nurseries, schools and libraries. Many of them began the day with a live online assembly hosted by Michael Rosen, the former Children’s Laureate. He was joined by Liv Torc and Chris Redmond of Hot Poets, a group who use spoken word poetry to talk about climate change, and by two of the country’s Young Poet Laureates. Schools were invited to send in their own endings to the phrase “Wonder is…”, with the plan being for Rosen to weave them into a brand new poem on the spot.
The day arrived on the back of some very encouraging news. New research from the National Literacy Trust has found that 30.7% of children aged between 8 and 18 now read poetry in their free time at least once a month, which is the highest figure the charity has recorded since 2010. Sales are healthy too. As we reported back in August, poetry sales in the UK passed the £8 million mark in the first 30 weeks of the year, a rise of 13.3%, helped along by a surge of interest in Homer.
Away from the classroom there were readings, workshops and open mic nights up and down the country. In London, the Poetry Society marked the occasion with a special edition of its Poetry Unplugged night at the Poetry Café.
Lucy Macnab of the Forward Arts Foundation summed up the thinking behind the theme very simply: “Wonder is what poetry does best.”
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