The Pulitzer Prizes are just now posted. The poetry award, "For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000)" goes to Tracy K. Smith whose book Life on Mars is from Graywolf Press. The Pulitzer site describes the books as "a collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain." Tracy K. Smith is assistant professor at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. She received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Harvard College and Columbia University, and she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1997-99. Her books are: Life on Mars, Duende, and The Body's Question. Smith is the recipient of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2005 Whiting Award and the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and is the Literature protégé in 2009-2011 cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She has also taught at the City University of New York, University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University.
Here's a personal essay by her on the blog: http://aboutaword.org/2012/03/04/tracy-k-smith/
Here are some poems on the Academy of American Poetry site: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16830
Here's a 2004 interview link http://www.cstone.net/~poems/essatksm.htm
Two poetry finalists are Forrest Gander's Core Samples from the World (New Directions), "a compelling work that explores cross-cultural tensions in the world and digs deeply to identify what is essential in human experience"; and Ron Padgett's How Long (Coffee House Press), "an enchanting collection of poems that juggle delight, wit and endless fascination with language."
