Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
| The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards | |
|---|---|
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| Location | Claremont, California |
| Country | United States |
| Presented by | Claremont Graduate University |
| First awarded | 1993/1994 |
| Official website | The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards |
The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards are a pair of American prizes based at Claremont Graduate University. They are given to poets for their collections of poetry written in the English language, by a citizen or legal resident alien of the United States.
The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is a $100,000 prize presented to a mid-career, emerging poet who already possesses an established body of work. The Kingsley Tufts award is known to be one of the world's most lucrative poetry prizes.
Its counterpart, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, is given to a poet who demonstrates genuine promise in their first book of published poetry, with an attached purse of $10,000.
Kingsley Tufts held executive positions in the Los Angeles shipyards and wrote poetry as his avocation. His poetry has been featured in the New Yorker, Esquire, and Harpers, among others.
Following his death in 1991, Kingsley’s wife, Kate, sold her home and the majority of the couple’s estate in order to fund an endowment to help poets further their craft. She established the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1993 at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California.
Initially, the award was for $50,000, and has subsequently doubled due to increases in the endowment. It is intended for an emerging poet who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the acknowledged pinnacle of their career.
Kate Tufts had no prior affiliation with Claremont Graduate University, but when she met then-university President John Maguire and visited the campus, she became convinced that it was the perfect home for her poetry prize.
Unlike many literary awards, which are coronations for a successful career or body of work, the Kingsley Tufts award was created to both honor the poet and provide the resources that allow artists to continue working.
Kate Tufts said she wanted to create a prize “that would enable a poet to work on his or her craft for a while without paying bills.”
In 1994, just a year after the inauguration of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Kate Tufts founded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which began in the amount of $5,000, but has since doubled to $10,000.
Kate Tufts died in June 1997, at the age of 86. While she did not live to see her awards grow to become some of the largest poetry prizes in the world, she certainly took pride in their inception while she was alive.
Doug Anderson, 1995 Kate Tufts Discovery Award recipient, remembers her sardonic wit when meeting her that year: “She came into the room at the Claremont Graduate School grumbling that she couldn’t smoke in there, and then she stopped and looked at Tom Lux [that year’s Kingsley Tufts award recipient] and myself. Kate Tufts looked at us and said, ‘You don’t know how glad I am that this year’s awards were given to a couple of really disreputable poets.’”
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