Carlie Hoffman ’16 has been awarded a 2024 National Jewish Book Award for her poetry collection When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023).
The National Jewish Book Award, currently in its 73rd year, is one of the Jewish Book Council’s longest-running programs. This year, the organization received around 650 submissions judged by over 100 judges.
When There Was Light expands on Hoffman’s debut collection, This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). The book delves into an inquiry of Hoffman’s Stammbaum, or bloodline. In a poem called “Give the Lake a Moment to Speak About the Horses,” Hoffman writes:
Your mother is a person you try
jumping in the same way you would
glassy stream,
only to find it frozen.
“Carlie Hoffman’s When There Was Light shows a mastery of thinking through language,” states National Jewish Book Award judge, Sean Singer. “The texture, subtlety and beauty of these poems are brought together through constant pressuring: questions of family, identity, loss, and shame.
“She goes deep into herself, to envelope and implicate it," Singer continues, "to be in an in-between place, an exile, holding a hatchet to cut new trails in the cartography. When There Was Light adds to Jewish poetics not only in its subjects, but in its system of thought: an area of doubts, wishes, and possibilities.”
Carlie Hoffman has also received a 92Y/Discovery Prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, and a 2023 Loose Translation Prize for her translation of Blütenlese by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press). She has also received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Columbia University. In addition to her two books of poetry (a third is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2025), she is also the translator of a monograph artbook called Weiße Schatten/ White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023).
When There Was Light is available for purchase here.
