Evie Shockley headshot

Evie Shockley has been named the winner of the 2023 Shelley Memorial Award. Established by the will of Mary P. Sears in 1930, The Shelley Memorial Award recognizes poetic genius and is bestowed upon one distinguished American poet each year.

Judges' Citation: Evie Shockley’s work is imbued with a particular kind of tenderness, for the world and for the self in the world. It’s a savvy tenderness wedded to a type of vigilance that continually tracks the lines of the political and the personal, documenting where they meet and where they later separate again. There is, as well, a keen recognition of how prosody can heighten the reader’s awareness of the fact that what is in front of them on the page has been curated so that the complexity of the presentation will echo the complexity of the human actions that make up the moral universe of the poem.

Read complete citation on the Poetry Society of America website.