The Poetry Society of America (PSA) has announced that poet Gerald Stern will receive the 2014 Frost Medal, the organization’s most prestigious award, given annually for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.
The son of immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, Gerald Stern was born in 1925 in Pittsburgh. He is the author of eighteen books of poetry, including most recently In Beauty Bright (Norton, 2012), as well as two chapbooks and four essay collections. His collection This Time: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award in 1998, and in 2000 he was appointed the first poet laureate of New Jersey. Among numerous other accolades, he has also received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University, and has taught literature and creative writing at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Drew University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.
Stern will be honored, along with the recipients of PSA’s annual Shelley Award, Chapbook Fellowships, and a number of other annual poetry awards, at a ceremony on April 9 in New York City. Admission is free and open to the public.
Previous Frost Medal winners have included Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Moore, Marilyn Nelson, Charles Simic, and Wallace Stevens.
In the video below, Gerald Stern reads his poem “The Dancing” for Public Television’s Poetry Everywhere series.
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Sinibaldi replied on Permalink
Suave cantilena.
El el candor
de la noche
de nuevo regresa
la luz infinita
de una tierna
poesía, el soplo
del viento y
la cándida voz
que recuerda
el pasado.
Francesco Sinibaldi