Alumna Mei-mei Berssenbrugge '73 Wins Yale's 2021 Bollingen Prize for Poetry

The Yale University Library recently announced that alumna Mei-mei Berssenbrugge '73 is the winner of the 2021 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. This prestigious prize is awarded every two years to the poet with the best volume of poetry published in those two years or for lifetime achievement. 

Berssenbrugge, who was recently shortlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for her latest collection, A Treatise on Stars (New Directions Publishing, 2020), is the 52nd poet to win the Bollingen Prize, which was established in 1948. Past winners include W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, and 2020 Nobel Prize winner, Louise Glück. 

According to the three judges of this year's prize—Charles Bernstein, Maureen N. McLane, and Nicole Sealey—"Berssenbrugge's poetry explores the permeable boundaries between the human and the natural worlds, as she makes palpable her communion with birds, plants, dolphins, stars, and the beyond...Emerging from the ferment of the Basement Workshop, a collective of Asian-American poets, artists, and activists in the 1970s, Berssenbrugge went on to create a visionary ecopoetics that directly confronts our planetary—and human—crisis...A Treatise on Stars is a far-out star flight—profoundly meditative, extravagant, disarming, open." 

Bollingen Prize Director Nancy Kuhl said, "Poetry is an enduring human necessity. The Bollingen Prize celebrates and supports the work of living poets whose voices resonate in our complex time...poets, like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, whose work enlives and transforms all we are capable of thinking. We are thrilled that the 2021 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry has been awarded to Berssenbrugge for her lifetime contributions to American poetry and for her beautiful and transporting book, A Treatise on Stars." 

When asked how she felt about winning the prize, Berssenbrugge said, "It's a feeling like a lock unclicking, like suddenly standing on the ground, when you send out words and those words are received. I'm thankful for the Bollingen Prize as an emblem of reading and being read. I'm thankful to be recognized by this award committee of inspiring writers, and inspired all my life from reading those poets recognized before me." 

The Bollingen Prize, which is administered by the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) at the Beinecke Library, includes a monetary award of $165,000. 

Mei-mei Berssenbruggee was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Hello, the Roses, Empathy, and I Love Artists. Her collaborations include works in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts. Berssenbrugge has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two American Book Awards, a PEN West Award, and honors from the Western States Art Foundation and the Asian American Writers Workshop. She lives in New Mexico and New York City.