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The National Book Foundation announced the Longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 1 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
The 2024 Poetry Longlist includes poets in all stages of their publishing careers, and nine of the ten poets on the Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees. The only poet that has been previously honored by the National Book Awards is Rowan Ricardo Phillips, who was Longlisted in 2015 for his poetry collection Heaven.
This year’s Poetry Longlist includes five Guggenheim Fellows and two Pulitzer Prize winners. The poets have been recognized by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prizes, and more. Five of the books come from independent publishers and two come from university presses, including one publisher that is appearing on the National Book Award Longlists for the first time: Texas Review Press.
Two Longlisted poets compassionately reflect on the ordinary and the everyday, and offer a necessary reminder that even the most mundane act can be remarkable. Anne Carson’s latest collection considers Roget’s Thesaurus, her father, Guantánamo, water, and many more deceptively disconnected topics that, as the collection’s title suggests, might seem “wrong.” The 25 prose poems in Wrong Norma, interspersed with images hand-drawn by Carson, features glimpses at the inner workings—and often disjointed nature—of the human mind. In her newest poetry collection, Dorianne Laux tenderly examines the quotidian—a shovel and rake, Bisquick, salt, and even a can of WD-40—alongside motherhood, aging, and loss. Life on Earth reflects on the many delights and heartbreaks of life, compels us to embrace the abundant beauty of the natural world, and, perhaps most importantly, invites us to consider that even the most ordinary aspects of our messy humanity can be worthy of poetry.
Fady Joudah’s collection of poems is a rumination on the unspeakable atrocities of war; the present and ongoing erasure of Palestinian people, history, and culture; and a dedication to a people’s everyday desires and humanity. The collection’s title—[…], ellipsis in brackets—doubles as a space for mourning, and an urgent reminder for all of us to pay attention to the harms of passive voice and the need for a future voice for the stories of Palestinian people.
Two Longlisted poets offer deeply personal interrogations of US history, intertwining archive, art, and self. Spanning 400 years of history, Elizabeth Willis investigates Mormonism—the religion she was born into—and its influence on domestic labor, economics, and family dynamics. Interweaving research material—including the multilayered voices of Willis’s own family members—Liontaming in America juxtaposes performance and the long tradition of lion taming with the United States’ continuous settler colonial project. Gregory Pardlo traces the ways in which American society has historically regarded Black people as threats and how these panic-driven perceptions influence the ongoing criminalization and persecution of Black bodies. Beginning with Tituba, the only enslaved Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, Spectral Evidence grapples with objectification, femininity, beauty, and the painful truths that dictate how Blackness and womanhood have been viewed throughout history and into the present day.
Three Longlisted books of poetry, including one debut collection, make the case for reclaiming language as an act of survival. The Book of Wounded Sparrows reflects on all that can be lost—a sense of identity, culture, language, and even history—in pursuit of the American Dream. Traversing the borders of visual art and text and shifting between English and Spanish, Octavio Quintanilla makes a history of dislocation physical, and transforms it into a source of creativity. In the face of displacement, grief, and the ongoing horrors of war, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha scrutinizes language and the obfuscation of Palestinian history, both in Palestine and across the diaspora. Part elegy for a people and a country, Something About Living probes the borders of politics, speech, and culture, to preserve brief moments of joy in defiance of continued violence. Through poetry and prose, m.s. RedCherries’s debut collection tells the story of an Indigenous child adopted by a non-Native family and her journey, as an adult, to return to her tribe. Blending real and imagined histories and community lore, mother presents a poignant exploration of Indigenous identity, the relationship between daughters and mothers, and the universal desire to find a way home.
Two collections reflect on the power of poetry and the role of poets to help make sense of the world. Through dreamlike poems, Rowan Ricardo Phillips is determined to uncover the musicality and “the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life.” Phillips’ fourth collection, Silver, acknowledges the very worst of the years following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s murder, while daring readers to imagine again, with poetry as a guide. Borrowing its title from the first poetry course she took as a college student, Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss examines contemporary poetry with irreverence and love—interrogating which voices are enshrined in textbooks, anthologies, and publishing, as well as those left out. Modern Poetry and its author claim poetry, for all of its limitations, as essential—to poets and to readers.
Publishers submitted a total of 299 books for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. The judges for Poetry are Richard Blanco (Chair), Carolyn Forché, Tyehimba Jess, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Rena Priest. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. For more information about the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the broadcast, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
Anne Carson, Wrong Norma
New Directions Publishing
Fady Joudah, […]
Milkweed Editions
Dorianne Laux, Life on Earth
Norton / W. W. Norton & Company
Gregory Pardlo, Spectral Evidence
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Silver
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Octavio Quintanilla, The Book of Wounded Sparrows
Texas Review Press
m.s. RedCherries, mother
Penguin Books / Penguin Random House
Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry
Graywolf Press
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living
University of Akron Press
Elizabeth Willis, Liontaming in America
New Directions Publishing
