Poet Divya Victor was named the 2022 winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award on Wednesday for her book “Curb,” a collection that blends poetry, prose, memoir and history, according to a release from Claremont Graduate University, which hosts the award.

The award, which is said to be the largest monetary prize in the world for a single collection of poetry, goes to a mid-career poet. The 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which is awarded to poets at the start of their career, was awarded to torrin a. greathouse for her debut collection, “Wound From the Mouth of a Wound.”

Victor will receive a $100,000 prize for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and greathouse will receive $10,000 for her honor.

An associate professor of English at Michigan State University, Victor expressed both her shock and gratitude when she received the call.

“I feel like I’m floating,” said Victor upon hearing she had won per the release. “I feel like there’s been a loss of physics.”

Also according to the release, Victor praised the judges for seeing “what I was trying to do, what I was working to do. It was not a path that I knew until I took it, you know?”

Poet Patricia Smith, the 2018 winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, chaired the judging committee this year.

“We think your book is going to rattle the rafters,” Smith told Victor according to the university release. “We appreciate the work, the research, the way you zoned in and put us close to what we needed to know, the way you changed the conversation. I don’t think anything that comes after you will make as much impact.”

The poet greathouse has described “Wound From the Mouth of a Wound,” as a collection of poems that focuses on “self-mythologization (and) the perspectives of a trans woman who is also a person with disabilities.”

Smith praised greathouse for a collection that not only is “very confrontational, but that shows us things we never see, things that we’re afraid to confront, afraid to read, and I think this book will be the cause of many fantastic conversations.”

Victor and greathouse will receive their awards on April 20 in a ceremony at Claremont Graduate University. They will conduct a public reading at the Los Angeles Public Library on April 21. (To register for the reading click here.)

Victor, as part of the Tufts award, will also to the campus for a week-long residency in the fall.

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