The Board of Governors of the Poetry Society of America is proud to announce Michael S. Harper as the recipient of the 2008 Frost Medal.

As a deeply respected teacher, mentor, and editor, and—supremely—as a poet, MICHAEL S. HARPER, University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970, has contributed profoundly to literary culture in our time. He has published more than ten books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems, Honorable Amendments, Healing Song for the Inner Ear, and two collections nominated for the National Book Award, Dear John, Dear Coltrane and Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems.

Professor Harper has edited the Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown and is co-editor with Anthony Walton of The Vintage Book of African American Poetry and Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945. With Professor Robert Stepto, he edited Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, published in 1979.

He was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island and has received many other honors, including the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, G.E.Murray heralded Harper's Images of Kin as the work of "one of the dominant poetic voices of his generation," extolling "his keen sense of political and personal histories, his breadth of expression." "As a vision of America," David Ignatow wrote in The New York Times Book Review, Images of Kin could have been the epilogue to Hart Crane’s masterpiece The Bridge.

Visit the Frost Medal Archive

The Shelley Memorial Award of more than $3,500, established by the will of the late Mary P. Sears, is given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need.

Ed Roberson has been selected as the recipient of the 2008 Shelley Memorial Award. Recent recipients of this prestigious award include Kimiko Hahn, George Stanley, Lyn Hejinian, Yusef Komunyakaa, Angela Jackson, Marie Ponsot, Jean Valentine, Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, Alan Dugan, Etheridge Knight, Kenneth Koch, Robert Pinsky, Cathy Song, and Anne Waldman.

Visit the Shelley Memorial Award Archive