Film, Video 2020 Bobbitt Prize: Terrance Hayes & Natasha Trethewey

Title

• 2020 Bobbitt Prize: Terrance Hayes & Natasha Trethewey

Summary

• The biennial Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry was given in 2020 to Terrance Hayes for his poetry collection "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin" and to former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey for lifetime achievement. The winners read from their work, and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden conferred the prize.

Event Date

• December 10, 2020

Notes

• -  Terrance Hayes, a recipient of the 2010 National Book Award, has published six collections of poetry and a book of criticism. His other honors include the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for poetry, a Whiting Writers Award, an NAACP Image Award for Poetry and a Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Hayes was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017 and serves as an ex officio member of the academy's board of directors. He is currently a professor of English at New York University.
• -  Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, "Domestic Work"(2000), "Bellocq's Ophelia" (2002), "Native Guard" (2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—"Thrall" (2012) and, most recently, "Monument: Poems New and Selected" (2018). She is also author of "Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir" (2020) and "Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast" (2010). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities and, in 2019, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Currently, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.
• -  Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress on September 14, 2016, the first woman and the first African American to lead the national library.

Running Time

• 37 minutes 24 seconds

Online Format

• video
• image
• online text