Claremont Graduate University announced on February 27 that Dawn Lundy Martin has been selected as the winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for her collection Good Stock Strange Blood and Diana Khoi Nguyen has won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Ghost Of. While the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award is given in recognition of a work by a mid-career poet, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award bestows $10,000 on a poet for a debut book.

Good Stock Strange Blood was praised by the judging committee as a “fascinating, mysterious, formidable, and sublime” collection that presents “an uncompromising poetics of resistance and exactitude,” while the committee praised Ghost Of as a “vibrant, sharp, and gorgeous” meditation on the loss of her brother and the impacts of grief.

Good Stock Strange Blood and Ghost Of were selected from five finalists per award. “We loved all of our finalists in very different ways because they’re all very different books,” said Timothy Donnelly, who chaired the judging committee. “The two books we finally chose are challenging. They are probably different from what many people are used to or expect from poetry. Martin and Nguyen capture a whole new layer of being in their work that, to many, will still be unfamiliar.”

Martin and Nguyen will receive their awards during a private ceremony at Claremont Graduate University. They will also give a public reading on April 11 at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanic Gardens in San Marino, California.

Image Credits: Max Freeman (Martin), photo courtesy of the author (Nguyen).