Related Resources at the Library
The following poetry awards, supported through private funds, are given under the auspices of the Library of Congress.
Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
The winners of the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry are Charles Wright, for Lifetime Achievement, and Bob Hicok, for his book This Clumsy Living, published in 2007 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
The biennial, privately funded $10,000 prize, given on behalf of the nation, recognizes the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two years. The prize is donated by the family of the late Mrs. Bobbitt of Austin, Tex., in her memory, and established at the Library of Congress. Bobbitt was the late President Lyndon B. Johnson's sister. While a graduate student in Washington, D.C., during the 1930s, Rebekah Johnson met college student O. P. Bobbitt when they both worked in the cataloging department of the Library of Congress. They married and returned to Texas.
View Bobbitt Prize Winners
Rules for the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
Witter Bynner Fellowships
Steven Schwartz discusses the
Witter Bynner Fellowships
The Witter Bynner Foundation is giving the Library a five-year gift in order to award two or more poets each year, chosen by the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in conjunction with the Library, and to encourage poets and poetry. The fellowships are to be used to support the writing of poetry. Only two things are asked of the fellows: that they organize a local poetry reading and that they participate in a poetry program at the Library of Congress.
The funding source for the fellowships, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, was incorporated in 1972 in New Mexico to provide grant support for programs in poetry through nonprofit organizations. Mr. Bynner was an influential early-20th-century poet and translator of the Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching, which he named The Way of Life According to Laotzu. He traveled with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and proposed to Edna St. Vincent Millay (she accepted, but then they changed their minds). He worked at McClure’s magazine, where he published A.E. Houseman for the first time in the United States and was one of O. Henry’s early fans.
The Executive Director of the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry is Steven Schwartz.