Lifetime Achievement Awardees

The Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes poets and scholars of poetry who have significantly impacted the field through excellent creative and/or critical contributions, meaningful mentorship of younger generations of poets and scholars, and committed community and/or institution building.

Awards are presented at the decennial Furious Flower Poetry Conference.

Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady is the author of several books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and his most recent collection The War Against the Obvious. His work appears in many journals, magazines, and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry. With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. In 2023, he and Derricote were the inaugural recipients of The Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. Cornelius Eady’s musical group has performed at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, AWP Conference, Peabody Essex Museum, and Hill-Stead Museum. Eady has taught poetry at SUNY Stony Brook, where he directed its Poetry Center; City College; Sarah Lawrence College; New York University; The Writer’s Voice; The 92nd St Y; The College of William and Mary; Sweet Briar College; and The University of Missouri-Columbia. Eady has been a teacher for over twenty years, and is currently the Chair of Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, and The World Is Round. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020. Finney’s work has attracted awards from organizations across the country, including the PEN American Open Book Award in 1999 and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry in 2004; the GCLS Literary Award in 2012; several awards from the Kentucky Arts Council and Kentucky Foundation for Women; the Aiken-Taylor Award from the Sewanee Review and the University of the South; the Wallace Stevens Award, given annually by the Academy of American Poets to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, and most famously, the National Book Award for Poetry for her 2011 book Head Off & Split. She is presently a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the University of South Carolina, she holds the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Literature and a Carolina Distinguished Professorship. She has recently been appointed the Executive Director of the newly launched Ernest A. Finney Jr. Cultural Arts Center in Columbia, a 21st century arts and cultural center named for her father, an exciting endeavor deeply planted in the twin soils of creativity and Black cultural expression.

Lorna Goodison

The first female Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017-2020), Lorna Goodison has won many awards for her work, including the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica. Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems, Supplying Salt and Light, Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, Controlling the Silver, Traveling Mercies, Heartease, and Tamarind Season. She is also the author of the short story collections By Love Possessed, Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah, and Baby Mother and the King of Swords. Her memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People, won the BC (British Columbia) National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was a finalist for both the Trillium Book Award and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. She won Daily News Prize in 1997 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her second book of poetry, I am Becoming My Mother. Her work is also featured in numerous anthologies, including the Longman Anthology of British Literature, the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. Lorna Goodison is Professor Emerita at University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia with her husband Professor Ted Chamberlin.

E. Ethelbert Miller

E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. Miller’s latest book is How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask. Miller is the editor of the anthologies Women Surviving Massacres and Men; In Search of Color Everywhere, which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a Book of the Month Club selection; and Beyond the Frontier. He is the author of the memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller is Associate Editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. He received a Columbia Merit Award in 1993 and was honored by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House in 2003. Miller has held positions as scholar-in-residence at George Mason University and as the Jessie Ball DuPont Scholar at Emory & Henry College. He has conducted writing workshops for soldiers and the families of soldiers through Operation Homecoming.

Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen’s latest books are Open Leaves/poems from earth and a critical edition of her poetry, Her Silver-Tongued Companion. Others include Recyclopedia, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be received an Elizabeth Agee Award. Graywolf Press published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary in 2013, and will release a new poetry collection, Regaining Unconsciousness, in 2025. Her poems, short stories, and essays are published widely and reprinted in over one hundred anthologies, including several published by Norton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin presses. Her work appears in Best of Callaloo and was selected six times for the Best American Poetry anthology series. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2023 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Hungarian, Kyrgyz, and Vietnamese. Harryette Mullen teaches courses at UCLA. 

Niyi Osundare

Widely regarded as one of Africa’s most renowned poets, scholars, and public intellectuals,  Niyi Osundare has authored over 20 books of poetry, two books of selected poems, (with individual poems in over 100 journals and magazines across the world), four plays, a book of essays, and numerous monographs and articles on literature, language, culture, and society. In 2004, his award-winning book of poems, The Eye of the Earth, which won the 1984 Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1984, was selected as One of Nigeria’s Best 25 Books of the 20th Century. For his creative works, Osundare has received many prizes and awards, including the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize, the Cadbury/ANA Poetry Prize, the Noma Award, the Tchicaya U Tam’si Award for African Poetry, the Outstanding Achievement Award of the 5th Boao International Poetry Festival, Shanghai, China, and the Fonlon/Nichols Award. His poem, ‘Raindrum’ (along with its Yoruba translation) was selected as part of Nigeria’s contribution to the cultural events which complemented the 2012 London Olympics. In 2014, he was admitted to the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), Nigeria’s highest recognition for distinguished intellectual and creative achievement. His poems have been translated into French, Italian, Slovenian, Korean, German,  Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Serbian, and Chinese, and others. And he has been awarded honorary doctorates by universities in Nigeria, France, and the United States.

Tim Seibles

Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including his most recent, Voodoo Libretto, One Turn Around the Sun, and Fast Animal, which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award. His other titles include Buffalo Head Solos, Hammerlock, Hurdy-Gurdy, and Body Moves. His poems have been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal. Seibles’s poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets; Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living; Villanelles; Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else; and In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African American Poetry. His poems have also been featured in Best American Poetry 2010, 2013, and 2023. He received fellowships from both the Provincetown Fine Arts Center and The National Endowment for the Arts. He also won the Open Voice Award from the 63rd Street Y in New York City. In 2016, Seibles was named Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Terry McAuliffe. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is also a teaching board member of the Muse Writers Workshop. 

Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith, recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, is the author of Unshuttered, a book of dramatic monologues accompanied by 19th-century photos of African-Americans;  Incendiary Art, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The 1619 Project, The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She also edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir, and her contribution, the story When They Are Done With Us, won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best debut story. Smith has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from the Sewanee Review, residencies at the Macdowell Colony and Yaddo, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also a 4-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the at Princeton University, a chancellor in the Academy of American Poets, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.