Daniel D'Angelo | December 2011

Writers find prizes important because they bring at least a little fame, a little cash, and hopefully a prominent publication. Eminent prizes help to launch the careers of little-known or scarcely successful writers (think of Jaimy Gordon's National Book Award win for Lord of Misrule); they drive sales, they provide focus for the zeitgeist, and they reify greatness in the form of a medal, a check, or publicity that leads to employment.

But what else do we know about prizes, other than how they function as enigmatic career-shapers of writing culture? After looking at three prizes, high profile, lower profile, and should-be high-profile-the Pulitzer Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the newly created Montreal International Poetry Prize, it becomes clear that there is something noteworthy about prize culture. The total value of these three annual awards (or prospectively annual, in the case of the Montreal Prize) is $160,000. The Kingsley awards $100,000 to a single book of poems, the Montreal Prize awards $50,000 to a single poem, and the Pulitzer grants $10,000 to winners in each of twenty-one categories.

The Pulitzer, established in 1917, currently awards twenty-one prizes of $10,000 each. The process involves over 100 judges, a prize board of about twenty members, months of deliberation, thousands of entries, and hundreds of thousands of dollars exchanged in managing, administering, and protecting the Pulitzer organization. All of this is executed by one administrator, two full-time employees, and a single part-timer. For the last nine years, Sig Gissler, a journalism professor at Columbia University, has served as the administrator as well as a board member. In a recent phone interview, Gissler, 76, spoke about the workload required to manage the Pulitzer. His job involves hours and hours of phone calls, judge selection, finding members for the rotating prize board, organizing events and meetings, and playing the role of "public spokesperson for the Pulitzer," as he put it. The Pulitzer Prize is sustained almost solely by an endowment made by Joseph Pulitzer himself, supplemented by a period of intense fundraising from the '70s and '80s. Since restructuring the endowment in the '80s, the Prize has managed to grow and expand its resources every year, especially since it began requiring a $50 entry fee. Other than incorporating new categories, paying many of the judges, and occasionally raising the value of the cash prize (in 2002 it was raised from $7,500 to $10,000), the Pulitzer has become a self-sustained prize juggernaut. As long as there are people to administer and manage it, it will always be around. (Note: 2017 will be its one hundred year anniversary.)

The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award was first given in 1993. It was established by a one-time gift of $5 million from Kate Tufts, widow of Kingsley Tufts. The Tufts were lifelong fans of poetry who basically came out of nowhere with the prize, which is organized and administered by Claremont Graduate University. Like the Pulitzer, the Tufts Award is endowed, which protects it from wrongful manipulation. Since 1993, the investment funding the prize has only grown in value and, according to Patricia Easton, former director of the prize and current Philosophy Chair at Claremont, there are plans to increase the award from $100,000 to $125,000 in the near future and to continue incremental increases for as long as the endowment continues to grow (the only time the endowment didn't see growth was in 2008 when the market crashed). By the way, there has never been an entry fee for this award. On the Tufts Award website, there's a simple explanation for why the prize is worth so much: any poet will tell you...the only thing more rare than meaningful recognition is a meaningful payday. And just like the Pulitzer, because of a significant, well-protected one-time gift, the Kingsley Tufts Award will be around for as long as there are people to administer it.

The Montreal Poetry Prize is an outlier among serious literary prizes because it doesn't follow the typical model of having a large initial endowment tied to a university and a name. It was started by three still-living people: Peter Abramowicz, Len Epp, and Asa Boxer. They decided they wanted to create a new and substantial international prize that would award $50,000 to a single poem. It took them just one year to found the Montreal Prize as a grassroots nonprofit organization, establishing a website, an editorial board that spans the globe, and an advisory board; locating start-up funds (in the form of an anonymous gift of $50,000); and opening the award to its first entries in March of 2011.
"Poetry is undervalued beyond belief," said Asa Boxer. "The public hasn't, somehow, seen the value of poetry. What better way of attaching a value to a single poem than to actually award it that high value?" He added, "A poem that wins our contest has got to grab your heart and your guts. Any good artwork will do that."

"Competitions grow audiences," said Boxer. The Montreal Prize received over 3,200 entries from fifty-nine countries in its first year. Boxer also noted that the Montreal Prize would not happen again unless they acquire sponsorship. However, in regards to making the prize self-sustaining, he said, "It can be done. It will certainly grow. There is proof that this model works. Everything's ready to go for year two at the push of a button; we just need a sponsor. People can raise money for just about anything."

The Montreal Poetry Prize continues to live off of support from writers. Because it's not endowed like the Kingsley and Pulitzer, it won't continue without support. Boxer suggests that people can't just wait for a generous benefactor to die and leave his fortune to the arts, but that people must take initiative building institutions for their communities.

This grassroots arts award model symbolizes an opportunity for writers, readers, and patrons of the arts to show how they value the written word. If it succeeds, then we prove what Boxer set out to prove: if we use prizes to inform people of the high value of writing, then writing will earn that high value in the minds of those who disagree. At various points in history, it was culturally decided that music, painting, sculpture, and even professional sports (all forms of highly specialized aesthetic and physical expression) were highly valuable to culture. While the novel has seen commercial and cultural success, poetry and short stories continue to be marginalized-undervalued economically and preserved in academic institutions.

Great prize organizations challenge these notions by annually reestablishing the standards for literature. Prizes aren't always about increasing book sales or simply paying writers. They inform us how to honor great work, and they put a spotlight on great work itself. A cash prize assigns a numerical value to greatness.

"The poetry community rewards itself by having the ability to create (awards)," said Asa Boxer. "Everybody benefits from the fruits of this labor. We're very ambitious. In one year we did what we were advised should take two to three years. We thought no way. (So far) we've pulled this off because we could. We did the work."

Patricia Easton, when asked if there could ever be a $1 million prize for poetry, said, "I don't see why not." She argues that perceptions of art and how we value it can be changed by the work of prize organizations. The Kingsley Tufts award now has a list of eighteen poets whose single books of poetry are, by virtue of the prize, worth $100,000. "Art has power," said Easton. "Art has that role of changing how we perceive,"

"Our winners become part of an aristocracy of excellence in America," said Sig Gissler, speaking to the acumen of the Pulitzer Prize winners. "And the awards are like an x-ray look at American society across the decades."

Gissler added that giving out the Pulitzers each year is like "sprinkling fairy dust on the winners." Prizes make a big difference. "Our winners don't become hot beach reading," he said, "but they are of great substance and significance."