Poet Li-Young Lee receives $100,000 lifetime achievement prize from Poetry Foundation

NEW YORK -- Poet Li-Young Lee has won a $100,000 lifetime achievement prize, and Carole Boston Weatherford has been named the new Young People's Poet Laureate, the Poetry Foundation announced Tuesday.

The Chicago-based nonprofit also awarded its $10,000 Pegasus award for criticism to Elizabeth Sarah Coles and its $25,000 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry to Jen Benka, a poet and former president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets.

Lee, whose books include “The Dressing” and “The Invention of the Darling,” is this year's winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which has previously been given to Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin and Joy Harjo, among others. The prize is named for the late pharmaceutical heir whose $100 million donation to Poetry magazine in 2002 led to the creation of the Poetry Foundation.

Weatherford, who has published dozens of books and won numerous awards, will receive a $25,000 annual stipend for her two years as the young people's laureate, beginning in January. The foundation chooses laureates based on their “writing exceptional poetry for young readers while working to instill a lifelong love of poetry with new audiences.”

Weatherford succeeds Elizabeth Acevedo, appointed in 2022.

“I have many ideas swirling around in my head,” Weatherford said during a recent telephone interview. Recently retired as a professor at Fayetteville State University, she hopes to give presentations in the Plains states and other parts of the country she hasn't seen, create an online site that allows visitors to listen to poems and to reinforce poetry's power to educate.

“It tickles the tongue,” she says of poetry. “It makes you listen. It gets kids ready to read or gets them to develop a love of reading.”