St. Paul poet Michael Kleber-Diggs has won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, which awards him $10,000 and publication. Kleber-Diggs' debut collection, "Worldly Things," will be published in June 2021 by Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis.
Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist and book critic whose work has appeared in St. Paul Almanac, LitHub, the Rumpus, North Dakota Quarterly, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and elsewhere. He teaches in the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.
Judge Henri Cole said this about "Worldly Things": "Michael Kleber-Diggs's poems quietly put pressure on us to live up to our nation's ideals. He gives voice to the experiences and aspirations of middle-class Black America, and though the promised land is faraway, he finds grace in the natural world, long marriage, and fathering. These supple, socially responsible poems seem to me a triumphant, paradoxical, luminous response to a violent time in our history."
Laurie Hertzel • 612-673-7302
@StribBooks
