Please join us in welcoming to campus the winner of this year's Rilke Prize for Poetry, Kevin Prufer.

Q&A / Reception

• Wednesday, October 9, 2024
• 6:30 PM
• University Union 339
• Light refreshments will be served

Reading and Book Signing

• Thursday, October 10, 2024
• 8:00 PM
• University Union 382
• UNT Barnes & Noble will provide book sales

Kevin Prufer is the author of eight other poetry collections: The Art of Fiction: Poems (Four Way, 2021), How He Loved Them (Four Way, 2018), Churches (Four Way, 2014), In a Beautiful Country (Four Way, 2011), National Anthem (Four Way, 2008), Fallen From a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005), The Finger Bone (Carnegie Mellon, 2002), and Strange Wood (Winthrop/LSU, 1998). He is also the author of a chapbook, titled I Had Wanted a Happier Ending (Sting & Honey, 2021), and a novel, titled Sleepaway (Acre, 2024). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, four Pushcart Prizes, three Best American Poetry selections, and was long-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. He has also won the Julie Suk Award, the Prairie Schooner/Strousse Award, the William Rockhill Nelson Award, as well as numerous others from the Poetry Society of America (including the 2018 Lyric Prize). Prufer serves as co-curator of the Unsung Masters Series, editor-at-large for Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, and editor for several volumes of poetry. He is currently a professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.

Here's the judges' citation for The Fears (Copper Canyon Press), the 13th annual recipient of UNT's Rilke Prize:

In The Fears, his ninth collection, Kevin Prufer examines how each of us becomes "a dying animal body," eventually losing what makes us human to sickness, grief, and even the indifference of the nation state. The poems place the ancient Greeks and Romans alongside vividly rendered portraits of loved ones--a father dying of cancer, for instance--so that the epic, heroic past becomes a lens for meditating on the small, intimate tragedies of the present. And those intimate tragedies in turn yield ways of encountering the larger conflicts of our own historical moment. In lines that slide jaggedly across the page, Prufer moves between what he calls "mundanity" and "vastness," attempting to understand "the erasure of the self / into vastness" and, beyond that erasure, "the failures of empires." Bleak, clear-eyed, bracingly unsentimental, and insistent on the necessity of precise, accurate language, The Fears asks readers to remain politically engaged, to continue caring about the world.

For more information on Kevin Prufer, visit: https://www.kevinprufer.com/

For more information about the UNT Rilke Prize, visit: https://english.unt.edu/creative-writing/unt-rilke-prize.