If you want a literary award, simply attend Harvard
January 15, 2023 10:31 AM Subscribe
Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, later joined by Claire Grossman, began by noticing that poetry readings they regularly attended were held in “mainly white rooms.” They wanted to know why...Because prizes are a normative standard for success, they collected data on prizes — every prize since 1918 worth $10,000 or more in 2022 dollars. They recorded who won, what their gender and race were, where they earned their degrees, and who served as judges. Then they published what they found in a series of essays. What did they find?
When we compared prizewinning writers to the same random sample of writers in Books In Print, we noticed that those with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.
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A full 80 percent of United States Poet Laureates have either received or judged a prize awarded by the Academy of American Poets. The National Book Award, though more of an industry prize created to increase the visibility and sales of midlist titles, still counts Academy awardees as 65 percent of its Poetry winners. Over half of the winners of the Bollingen and the Pulitzer have Academy associations. There are nine poets who have associations with all five awards...
For most of the twentieth century, the prize’s definitions of literary excellence included only white writers. This history is probably one of the reasons why such awards are still perceived as overwhelmingly white, although the racial diversity of prizewinners more or less begins to echo the racial demographics of the US as a whole in the 2000s (we do not see this as a baseline for what should be called excellent, but rather a descriptive metric)... Despite changing the demographics of the prize, these larger shifts have not changed the insular nature of prestige networks. The Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellows offer a case study in this regard. The Fellows are a striking cross-section of a new literary establishment which in almost every way diverges from the old guard of poetry: they are young, racially diverse, often queer, and many emerge from spoken word scenes. But in other ways, the narrow scope of the prize remains the same. Half attended Stanford, New York University, University of Iowa, University of Houston, or University of Texas, Austin. Three quarters of the fellows have an MFA.
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The Post '45 datasets. See also the 19th Century Data Collective, World Literature Data Collective.
When we compared prizewinning writers to the same random sample of writers in Books In Print, we noticed that those with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.
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A full 80 percent of United States Poet Laureates have either received or judged a prize awarded by the Academy of American Poets. The National Book Award, though more of an industry prize created to increase the visibility and sales of midlist titles, still counts Academy awardees as 65 percent of its Poetry winners. Over half of the winners of the Bollingen and the Pulitzer have Academy associations. There are nine poets who have associations with all five awards...
For most of the twentieth century, the prize’s definitions of literary excellence included only white writers. This history is probably one of the reasons why such awards are still perceived as overwhelmingly white, although the racial diversity of prizewinners more or less begins to echo the racial demographics of the US as a whole in the 2000s (we do not see this as a baseline for what should be called excellent, but rather a descriptive metric)... Despite changing the demographics of the prize, these larger shifts have not changed the insular nature of prestige networks. The Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellows offer a case study in this regard. The Fellows are a striking cross-section of a new literary establishment which in almost every way diverges from the old guard of poetry: they are young, racially diverse, often queer, and many emerge from spoken word scenes. But in other ways, the narrow scope of the prize remains the same. Half attended Stanford, New York University, University of Iowa, University of Houston, or University of Texas, Austin. Three quarters of the fellows have an MFA.
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The Post '45 datasets. See also the 19th Century Data Collective, World Literature Data Collective.
What does it say about Harvard that its graduates cannot succeed as they have on their own merits? Why is this the best university in the world? Is corrupt influence really the best measure of that accolade?
posted by 1adam12 at 11:56 AM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by 1adam12 at 11:56 AM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
Are you alumni?
Desiring ticks and prizes?
Preen my crimson fur.
I took a 1 semester course at the Harvard Extension School 40 years ago while attending a much less prestigious college across the river. Does that qualify? Am patriarch. Will settle for$1,000 $500.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:13 PM on January 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
Desiring ticks and prizes?
Preen my crimson fur.
I took a 1 semester course at the Harvard Extension School 40 years ago while attending a much less prestigious college across the river. Does that qualify? Am patriarch. Will settle for
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:13 PM on January 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
Something I've noticed is that seemingly every published poet these days is an academic. I haven't done enough digging to see just what the percentage of academic poets is, but I'd be curious to find out if someone has.
posted by heteronym at 2:20 PM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by heteronym at 2:20 PM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
No expert on literary awards. But I think awards for art of any kind really aren't about the best piece of work, but rather "the best example of the kind of work we find this particular award should go to." The Academy Awards is an example of this. The term "Oscar-bait" is widely known even by people outside the movie industry.
I'm glad that the authors of this piece did this work. We need more examples that many of these "prestigious" awards can often be scams. The more exposure this gets, the better off the world will be, at least a little bit.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:27 PM on January 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
I'm glad that the authors of this piece did this work. We need more examples that many of these "prestigious" awards can often be scams. The more exposure this gets, the better off the world will be, at least a little bit.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:27 PM on January 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
Awards of all kinds are “really about a social ecosystem, who is up and who is down” as Matt Stoller points out in his recent economics newsletter.
posted by migurski at 2:37 PM on January 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by migurski at 2:37 PM on January 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
Something they talk about in a couple of the articles that grew out of this project is the reality that poetry in particular, and to a lesser extent fiction writing, is not associated with renumeration for any but a few, and those few are part of an insular network of poets (writers) in an Ivy League/awards network circle-jerk of mutual prize giving. So the only way to be a poet (or writer) who gets paid to write, is to be a winner in this awards system.
That Stoller article is interesting and as I was reading this research about literary awards I was thinking about how these are not just people, but systems, where patterns emerge and the people in the system respond to those patterns. Logically, you can see the system rewards MFAs, so more people get MFAs now. And the system is reinforcing of awards contests, and so those have proliferated.
To the extent that people of color, queers and women are now winning awards and getting noticed by big book reviews etc, it is due in large part to their formation of their own mutual support networks, an echo of the white male networks that dominated until the 80s, which even if they were not explicitly racially exclusive, they were in fact:
The reasons for this change are large, complicated, and interconnected, reflecting the shifting cultural terrain of the late 1960s and culminating in the so-called “culture wars” of the late 1980s. Literature played a major role in institutional debates about multiculturalism and this attention dramatically changed the canon of what is thought of as excellent American literature. At the same time, racially attentive literary institutions such as the Dark Room Collective, VONA, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Cave Canem, and Kundiman began to offer supportive programming and network-building opportunities for writers who identified as other than white....
Phillip B. Williams recently published a “Letter of Apology from a Ruth Lilly Fellow.” As Williams’s letter points out, there is no escaping “the nepotism of the award,” or the fact that everyone who won it “seemed to be close friends.” It is difficult not to notice, for instance, that all but one member of the Dark Noise Collective has won a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in recent years.
posted by latkes at 2:51 PM on January 15, 2023 [11 favorites]
That Stoller article is interesting and as I was reading this research about literary awards I was thinking about how these are not just people, but systems, where patterns emerge and the people in the system respond to those patterns. Logically, you can see the system rewards MFAs, so more people get MFAs now. And the system is reinforcing of awards contests, and so those have proliferated.
To the extent that people of color, queers and women are now winning awards and getting noticed by big book reviews etc, it is due in large part to their formation of their own mutual support networks, an echo of the white male networks that dominated until the 80s, which even if they were not explicitly racially exclusive, they were in fact:
The reasons for this change are large, complicated, and interconnected, reflecting the shifting cultural terrain of the late 1960s and culminating in the so-called “culture wars” of the late 1980s. Literature played a major role in institutional debates about multiculturalism and this attention dramatically changed the canon of what is thought of as excellent American literature. At the same time, racially attentive literary institutions such as the Dark Room Collective, VONA, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Cave Canem, and Kundiman began to offer supportive programming and network-building opportunities for writers who identified as other than white....
Phillip B. Williams recently published a “Letter of Apology from a Ruth Lilly Fellow.” As Williams’s letter points out, there is no escaping “the nepotism of the award,” or the fact that everyone who won it “seemed to be close friends.” It is difficult not to notice, for instance, that all but one member of the Dark Noise Collective has won a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in recent years.
posted by latkes at 2:51 PM on January 15, 2023 [11 favorites]
seemingly every published poet these days is an academic.
I would imagine that's partly a product of Creative Writing becoming an academic discipline: you produce MFAs who then circle back into the system to teach future MFAs. It's also partly a product of the changing economics of being a poet/writer -- there's no longer that class of educated, leisured, relatively moneyed upper-middle class people who can write without worrying about supporting themselves, and almost nobody can actually support themselves financially on poetry sales (except for someone like Rupi Kaur, perhaps), so teaching is the best option.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:11 PM on January 15, 2023 [12 favorites]
I would imagine that's partly a product of Creative Writing becoming an academic discipline: you produce MFAs who then circle back into the system to teach future MFAs. It's also partly a product of the changing economics of being a poet/writer -- there's no longer that class of educated, leisured, relatively moneyed upper-middle class people who can write without worrying about supporting themselves, and almost nobody can actually support themselves financially on poetry sales (except for someone like Rupi Kaur, perhaps), so teaching is the best option.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:11 PM on January 15, 2023 [12 favorites]
you produce MFAs who then circle back into the system to teach future MFAs.
In the US, most MFAs are teaching freshman comp to people majoring in anything else but English.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:21 PM on January 15, 2023 [10 favorites]
In the US, most MFAs are teaching freshman comp to people majoring in anything else but English.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:21 PM on January 15, 2023 [10 favorites]
Well, yeah, that's true, but there is the small population of "lucky" ones (depending on whether you think teaching grad school is better than teaching freshman comp) that teaches in MFA programs.
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:34 PM on January 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:34 PM on January 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
This research seems to point to those 'lucky' ones mostly being the ones who went to one of 4 US grad schools, sadly.
posted by latkes at 5:17 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by latkes at 5:17 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
So far as I know, it's possible, though rare, to make a living as a novelist in America, while it isn't possible to make a living as a poet, so there's no alternate path for poets other than awards.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:27 PM on January 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:27 PM on January 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
It is maybe a little surprising that there seem to be more people spending inherited money on running stylish little shops in high rent neighborhoods than there are spending it being poets.
Or maybe not; maybe a tranche of those academics are on featherbed fellowship lines.
Anyway, lyrics are poetry, and probably easier to make a living on than they were in some of the eras in which very serious poets got paid. I don’t think broadsheet ballads had strong protections.
… all of which is a diversion from the excellent original article. How close is the Post1945 dataset to prosopography?
posted by clew at 6:47 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Or maybe not; maybe a tranche of those academics are on featherbed fellowship lines.
Anyway, lyrics are poetry, and probably easier to make a living on than they were in some of the eras in which very serious poets got paid. I don’t think broadsheet ballads had strong protections.
… all of which is a diversion from the excellent original article. How close is the Post1945 dataset to prosopography?
posted by clew at 6:47 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'll check Instagram.
posted by clavdivs at 8:15 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by clavdivs at 8:15 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Any whiff of the woo or other vulgar appeal needed for success on the Oprah circuit is probably disqualifying for the gatekeepers of “serious” or “literary.”
posted by mubba at 5:44 AM on January 16, 2023
posted by mubba at 5:44 AM on January 16, 2023
But like, who cares if the academy or the literary awards circuit likes you if you're a winner on the Oprah circuit? If you've found success in popular culture, bless you! You have an income stream from your creative work. Whereas the majority of poets never will.
posted by latkes at 8:56 AM on January 16, 2023
posted by latkes at 8:56 AM on January 16, 2023
Vaguely related-- I just saw an offhand mention that there's money to be made writing indie romances, and more money in more specialized niches.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:03 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:03 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
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something else I'd like to highlight: the LARoB piece includes a really great analysis of The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual by Ada Limón as "an expression of the nauseating racial logic of contemporary prize-winning culture."
posted by Kybard at 11:02 AM on January 15, 2023 [4 favorites]