Santa Fe poet wins poetry prize

Apr. 4—Acclaimed poet and Santa Fe resident dg nanouk okpik has been named one of eight winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize, which celebrates literary legends and emerging talent in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama.

The prize, announced Tuesday, comes with an award of $175,000 intended to enable each of the writers to continue their work free of commercial pressure.

Born in Anchorage, Alaska, okpik is a Lannan Foundation Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She could not be reached for comment.

She won the American Book Award for her literary debut, Corpse Whale, in 2012, and her follow-up, Blood Snow, was published in October. Blood Snow was named one of five finalists for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry.

The first Iñupiaq-Inuit winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize, okpik's award citation says, "dg nanouk okpik's lapidary poems sound the depths of language and landscape, shuttling between the ancient past and imperiled present of Inuit Alaska in a searching meditation on ecology and time."

She grew up in Anchorage and attended Salish Kootenai College and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and she holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program.

Her poem Twilight Pain, published in 2022, begins with the evocative sentence:

"I have died so many midnight moons,

most of night soil not realized until later."

The Wave Books publishing page for Blood Snow says okpik's work "tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures."

The other Windham-Campbell Prize winners are poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, dramatists Jasmine Lee-Jones and Dominique Morisseau, nonfiction writers Darran Anderson and Susan Williams and novelists Percival Everett and Ling Ma.