Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy has been honored with the TS Eliot Prize, a prestigious accolade recognizing the most exceptional poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. This £25,000 award, regarded as a pinnacle of poetic achievement, celebrates Gizzi’s masterful exploration of grief and loss. Deeply informed by the mourning of his two brothers, the collection dares to confront the profoundest questions of existence, weaving a lyrical sequence that is at once haunting and illuminating. The judges, in their admiration, praised the collection for its boldness and its ability to grapple with life’s most daunting uncertainties, elevating Fierce Elegy as a work of both personal depth and universal resonance.
He is the author of Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Finalist for the National Book Award, Wesleyan, 2016); In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014); Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011); The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003); Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998); and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). In 2004 Salt Publishing of England reprinted an expanded edition of his first book as Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad.
His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry (1993), The Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He has twice been the recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. In 2018, Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi.
He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM), and Tamaas.
His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). He served as Poetry Editor for The Nation (2007-2011).
He has been on the faculty at Brown University (1993-95), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1995-2001), the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa (1998, 2007), The University of New Orleans Summer Program in Madrid (2004), Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg (2006), The Writer’s Workshop at The University of Iowa (Fall 2008), and Cambridge University (2010-11, 2015-16).
