"[6] In 2013, Carolyn Forché described the Academy of American Poets as "the most important organization in our country helping to keep poetry alive and in our culture.
Marie Bullock was the president of the Academy of American Poets for the next half a century, running the organization out of her apartment for thirty of those years.
Past Chancellors include W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, Marianne Moore, Mark Strand, and May Swenson.
[10] As of 2018, the fifteen Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets are: Elizabeth Alexander, Ellen Bass, Marilyn Chin, Kwame Dawes, Forrest Gander, Linda Gregerson, Terrance Hayes, Brenda Hillman, Marie Howe, Khaled Mattawa, Marilyn Nelson, Alicia Ostriker, Claudia Rankine, Alberto Ríos, and David St.
[6] The Academy responded by instituting major changes and designating several new chancellors, including African-American poets Lucille Clifton and Yusef Komunyakaa.
[21] The Fellowship program was created in 1946, and was the first of the organization's current portfolio of awards; the Academy's website Poets.org describes it as "the first of its kind in the United States.
[26] In 1995, it was endowed by a gift from the Drue Heinz Trust, and it was renamed to honor James Laughlin, who founded the publishing house New Directions in 1936.
[23] At present, winners receive a cash prize of $5,000, an all-expenses-paid weeklong residency at The Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida,[27] and the Academy of American Poets purchases one thousand copies of the winning book for distribution to its membership;[23][28] the purchase and distribution essentially guarantee that the book becomes "a bestseller in the tiny poetry market.
"[29] Edward Field has described the importance of receiving the Award to his career as follows:[30] ... perhaps it is just as well that I didn't succeed in getting a publisher earlier, since, with new poems being added all the time, the manuscript kept getting stronger.
Donald Justice, Lisel Mueller, Philip Schultz, and Tracy K. Smith have each won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
[39] It has been described as "a transformative honor that includes publication and distribution of the book though the Academy, $5,000 in cash and a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
In a New York Times opinion piece from 1985, the novelist John Barth noted that 1475 manuscripts had been entered into one of the Whitman Award competitions, which exceeded the number of subscribers to some poetry journals.
[48] Named for Wallace Stevens, the award was established in 1994 by Dorothea Tanning to "recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry".
The prize alternates annually between a straight $10,000 book price and a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and $20,000 for use in advancing a "significant work-in-progress", such as through travel or study.
[51] Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish.
[52] Luis Alberto Ambroggio sponsored the prize to "celebrate poets in the United States writing in Spanish as an important part of our rich American poetic tradition.