Jericho Brown is the recipient of the Aiken Taylor Award 2024; the announcement was made on Friday, August 16, 2024.
Conrad Potter Aiken was an American writer and poet, honoured with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and was United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952. His published works include poetry, short stories, novels, literary criticism, a play, and an autobiography.
In 1987, the Dr. K.P.A. Taylor, a poet and younger brother of Conrad Aiken set up the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. The annual prize, administered by the Sewanee Review and the University of the South, is awarded to a writer who has had a substantial and distinguished career. Some previous winners have been Gwendolyn Brooks, Vievee Francis, and Nikky Finney.
On Friday, the Sewanee Review announced that the recipient of the 2024 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry is Jericho Brown. Brown is the author of three collections of poetry: The Tradition, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The New Testament, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Please, which won the 2009 American Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill. Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Jericho Brown tweeted afterward, “Honored! Grateful!”
He will receive his award at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee this November.
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