We are pleased to announce that Harryette Mullen will judge the 2020 Walt Whitman Award, the nation’s most generous first-book prize for poetry. The winner of the Whitman Award will receive $5,000, publication by Graywolf Press in 2020, and a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy.
The poet Michael Palmer has noted that reading Mullen's work "is a bit like hearing a new musical instrument for the first time, playing against a prevalent social construction of reality." In 2009, Mullen received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement. Her most recent collection is Urban Tumbleweed (Graywolf Press, 2013).