Two prizes, one for a Canadian poet and one for an international poet, each carrying a $50,000 award, were announced by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

The Canadian winner is Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent by Liz Howard and the international winner is The Quotations of Bone by Norman Dubie.

The Judges’ Citation for Howard’s win reads, “With penetrating intelligence and playful musicality, Liz Howard’s ambitious debut collection keeps us delightfully off-balance with its mix of lyricism and experiment, allusion and invention. In her efforts ‘to dream a science that would name me,’ Howard explores a dizzying array of texts and landscapes, from Dante to Erin Mouré, from logging camps to high school dances.”

Arizona State University, where Norman Dubie is Regents’ Professor of English, issued a press release about the win. Included there is a comment by Cynthia Hogue, a colleague of Dubie’s at ASU: “This international poetry prize is just shy in distinction of the Nobel Prize internationally, or the Pulitzer Prize nationally. The Quotations of Bone is one of Dubie’s most powerful and visionary works in the last two decades.” Arizona State is an institutional member of AWP.

The Canadian shortlist for the prize included Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments by Ulrikka S. Gernes, which was translated by Per Brask and Patrick Friesen, and Tell: poems for a girlhood by Soraya Peerbaye.

The International shortlist included Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo; 40 Sonnets by Don Paterson; and Heaven by Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

In addition, Adam Zagajewski was given a lifetime achievement award from the Trust. Mark Doty, a trustee, presented the award to him and remarked, “Zagajewski’s limpid, often spare poems are undeceived; they know the blade of the invader may appear at any time, or the muffling silence of repression. Yet he will not leave us without hope; his poems refuse the notion that we are powerless, even if all we can change are our own moments of perception.”