Literary Prizes Under Scrutiny
Poets Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young—friends and colleagues at Mills College in Oakland, where they both teach—leaped into the seemingly unpoetic world of statistical analysis sixteen years ago. What began as an inquiry into gender parity in poetry publishing has expanded into a much more ambitious project, with a more complex and provocative question at its heart: “Who gets to be a writer?” Their search for an answer has led them and their former student Claire Grossman, now pursuing her PhD at Stanford University, to amass an enormous set of data tracking demographic and other information about nearly 1,800 writers over the past century.
What these writers share is having won what Grossman, Spahr, and Young call a “major literary prize”: one of fifty U.S. national-level awards of at least $10,000 in poetry, fiction, or without genre specification. These honors include well-known prizes such as the National Book Award and lesser-known accolades, such as the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers—founded in 2006 with a current value of $80,000—is also among those counted. Grossman, Spahr, andpersonal and professional, allowing them to satiate their personal curiosity while contributing to the scholarly discourse around literary production that is part of their work as academics. They aim to better understand the system of literary reward in the United States and who is represented in that system, which has far-reaching implications.
