Dante Micheaux is an American poet whose work Circus was the winner of the 2019 Four Quartets Prize, presented by the Poetry Society of America in partnership with the T. S. Eliot Foundation, having been selected by judges Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Carmen Giménez Smith and Rosanna Warren.
[4][5][6] Dante Micheaux grew up in New Jersey, United States, and studied at New York University, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.
[7][8] With his first book of poetry, The Amorous Shepherd, being published 2010, his work has won significant praise, including from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who described the collection as having "a marvelous sonority and sincerity that go directly for the experienced heart".
"[10] Circus was awarded the 2019 Four Quartets Prize, presented by the Poetry Society of America in partnership with the T. S. Eliot Foundation, in 2019, when the judges' citation stated: "How right that this poet's first name should be Dante.
... His language exults, triumphs, and freely rummages in the treasuries of the Bible, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, Baraka, and Mahalia Jackson, taking what it needs, making it his sovereign own, a wrested blessing.