Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin Receives Prestigious National Fellowship

We are beyond thrilled to announce that the Academy of American Poets has awarded Louisiana’s Alison Pelegrin a Poet Laureate Fellowship! The Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowship, which is supported by the Mellon Foundation, funds the work of select poets laureate around the country.

The Academy of American Poets, a leading champion of poets and poetry for ninety years, announced today that it will award $50,000 each to twenty-two poets serving as poets laureate in cities and states across the United States.

The Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowships recognize laureates’ literary excellence while enabling them to undertake meaningful and innovative projects that enrich the lives of community members, including youth, through responsive and interactive poetry activities.

“Poems bridge distances between people,” said Ricardo Maldonado, President and Executive Director of the Academy. “For ninety years, the Academy of American Poets has honored how poets nourish our spirit through poems, inviting us to reflect and commit to each other. I am excited to celebrate the work of our Poet Laureate Fellows across the country, elevating civil discourse and reminding us of the true possibility of a shared future.”

Pelegrin’s fellowship will support her Lifelines Prison Poetry Project, which will facilitate poetry workshops in ten prisons and jails and five community centers. She will create a project website featuring four Lifelines podcasts, each of which will introduce a poetry prompt. Selected excerpts inspired by each prompt will be printed on posters to be distributed statewide. As a culminating event, Pelegrin will present the project at the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Pelegrin is the author of several collections, including Our Lady of Bewilderment (LSU Press, 2022), which won the Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Louisiana Board of Regents. Pelegrin is writer in residence at Southeastern Louisiana University where she has taught for more than 20 years.

In addition to Pelegrin, the 2024 Poet Laureate Fellows and the communities they serve are Julia Bouwsma (Maine), Angelika Brewer (Ogden, UT), Traci Brimhall (Kansas), Ching-In Chen (Redmond, WA), Kai Coggin (Hot Springs, AR), Nandi Comer (Michigan), Tongo Eisen-Martin (San Francisco, CA), Heid E. Erdrich (Minneapolis, MN), Andrea Gibson (Colorado), Amanda Johnston (Texas), Patricia Spears Jones (New York), Charlotte Pence (Mobile, AL), Georgia A. Popoff (Onondaga County, NY), Jean Prokott (Rochester, MN), Joseph Rios (Fresno, CA), Lois Roma-Deeley (Scottsdale, AZ), Emily Schulten (Key West, FL), Tess Taylor (El Cerrito, CA), Arianne True (Washington State), Kerri Webster (Idaho), and avery r. young (Chicago, IL).