Harryette Mullen is the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ 2026 Wallace Stevens Award, the organization’s lifetime achievement prize.
The honor was presented Oct. 16 at a celebration at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as part of an evening of poetry readings. Mullen, a UCLA professor of English, was selected by the Academy’s Board of Chancellors, a group of distinguished poets from across the U.S.
“Hearing that I was selected for the Wallace Stevens prize, my immediate response to this startling good news was, at first, stunned silence; then, resounding laughter,” Mullen wrote in an email. “I am truly and deeply grateful to the Academy of American Poets for this gift that honors my life as a poet.
“I have been blessed to enjoy a lifetime of reading, writing and discussing poetry with people of all ages. Such a life, in many ways, is its own reward, and I know that the true value of poetry is incalculable. Like other arts, it is a vital expression of our shared humanity.”
Mullen’s award citation, written by poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, read in part: “Harryette Mullen has spent over thirty years committed to the rigorous, luscious and ravishingly ferocious work of making poems that refuse easy categorization and bring us to the thrilling edges of what language is capable of. … Like Gertrude Stein, Mullen’s curiosity and belief in the transcendent possibility of the everyday create a poetry that proves the avant-garde is often located right beneath our noses and in the juxtaposition of simple details that we often overlook.”
The Stevens Award carries a $100,000 stipend. Previous winners include Rita Dove, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich.
Mullen, who teaches poetry, African American literature and creative writing, wrote in the email that it would take some time for her “to absorb the information and to appreciate the impressive company that this award represents.”
Her previous honors include induction in to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023), the Jackson Poetry Prize (2010), an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (2009), a United States Artists Fellowship (2008) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005).
Mullen’s latest poetry collection, “Regaining Unconsciousness” addressed such topics as climate change, corporate greed, racist violence and artificial intelligence; it was cited among the books of the year for 2025 by Publishers Weekly and the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Her “Recyclopedia” (2006) won a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and her 2002 collection, “Sleeping With the Dictionary,” was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Read more about Harryette Mullen
Q&A: Harryette Mullen’s newest poetry brings us closer to nature (UCLA Newsroom, 2023)
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan/Courtesy of Academy of American Poets