Friends of Writers congratulates faculty member Sandra Lim, winner of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize. Poets & Writers awards the prize annually to “an American poet of exceptional talent.”

From the judges’ decision:

“It’s tempting to think of Sandra Lim as a philosopher poet, in the school of Marcus Aurelius—her poems address the conundrum of being a self with fears and feelings in spite of the mortality that should in theory put us at ease. Wielding a striking combination of cool detachment and sly humor, Lim constantly points to the mundane aspects of the world and to how we nevertheless cling to them, always expecting something more….Lim confronts the larger, defining abstractions of our lives—love, death, betrayal, the power dynamics of body and soul—in poems that ultimately defy easy category, refuse expectation, and have quietly challenged and reinvigorated the possibilities for what a poem can do, and how. It’s a poetry of interrogation, whose fierceness lies, paradoxically, in its quiet steadiness and precision.”