Poet Sjohnna McCray is the 2015 recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, an esteemed first-book prize for poetry given annually by the Academy of American Poets each year. McCray’s manuscript for Rapture earned him the award.
McCray will receive $5000 and his first book will published by Graywolf Press as part of the prize. In addition, McCray will be invited to a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy.
An Ohio native, McCray’s work has been published in a number of journals, including: The Southern Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and Shenandoah. Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Tracy K. Smith selected McCray for the award.
“These poems are so beautifully crafted, so courageous in their truth-telling, and so full of what I like to think of as lyrical wisdom—the visceral revelations that only music, gesture and image, working together, can impart—that not only did they stop me in my tracks as a judge, but they changed me as a person,” stated Tracy K. Smith of his work Rapture. “Sjohnna McCray’s is an ecstatic and original voice, and he lends it to family, history, race and desire in ways that are healing and enlarging. Rapture announces a prodigious talent and a huge human heart.”