Award Winners

2018 Shelley Award

Ntozake Shange


Selected by Dorianne Laux and Harryette Mullen

Ntozake Shange is an American poet, playwright, and novelist. Her poem "What Do You Believe A Poem Shd Do?" was featured in Poetry in Motion in 2015. Her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975) is a unique blend of poetry, music, dance and drama called a "choreopoem," which "took the theatre world by storm" in 1975, as noted Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post. Shange's next productions, A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977), Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1977), Spell No. 7 (1979) and Black and White Two Dimensional Planes (1979) impressed critics with their poetic quality.

Shange is the author of several poetry collections, including Nappy Edges (1978), which Washington Post Book World critic Harriet Gilbert praised by saying, "Nothing that Shange writes is ever entirely unreadable, springing, as it does, from such an intense honesty, from so fresh an awareness of the beauty of sound and of vision, from such mastery of words, from such compassion, humor and intelligence."

Shange's critically acclaimed novels include, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), Betsey Brown (1985), and Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1995). Her other works include The Love Space Demands, a choreopoem published in 1991; The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family (2004), with photographs by the Kamoinge Workshop; the essay collections See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, and Accounts 1976-1983 (1984) and If I Can Cook You Know God Can (1999); and four books for children: Whitewash (1997), the tribute to Mohammed Ali Float Like a Butterfly (2002), Ellington Was Not a Street (2003), and Daddy Says (2003). Shange also edited The Beacon Best of 1999, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays written by lesser-known men and women of color.


All Winners

2021

2020

2014

Bernadette Mayer

2013

Lucia Perillo
Martín Espada

2012

Wanda Coleman

2011

Rigoberto González
Joan Larkin

2010

Kenneth Irby
Eileen Myles

2009

Ron Padgett
Gary Young

2008

Ed Roberson

2007

Kimiko Hahn

2006

George Stanley

2005

Lyn Hejinian

2004

Yusef Komunyakaa

2003

James McMichael

2002

Angela Jackson
Marie Ponsot

2001

Alice Notley
Michael Palmer

2000

Jean Valentine

1999

Tom Sleigh

1998

Eleanor Ross Taylor

1997

Frank Bidart

1996

Robert Pinsky
Anne Waldman

1995

Stanley Kunitz

1994

Kenneth Koch
Cathy Song

1993

Josephine Jacobsen

1992

Lucille Clifton

1991

Shirley Kaufman

1990

Thom Gunn

1989

Thomas McGrath
Theodore Weiss

1988

Dennis Schmitz

1987

Mona Van Duyn

1986

Gary Snyder

1985

Etheridge Knight

1984

Robert Duncan
Denise Levertov

1983

Jon Anderson
Leo Connellan

1982

Alan Dugan

1981

Robert Creeley

1980

Julia Randall

1979

Robert Hayden