The Department of English is thrilled to kick off National Poetry Month with a piece of amazing alumni news: Robin Walter, an alum of CSU’s Creative Writing MFA Program, has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award for her manuscript, Little Mercy.
Described as a debut collection of verse that celebrates the natural world, Walter’s book was chosen by the poet Victoria Chang and will be published by the popular nonprofit publisher Graywolf Press in April 2025. Known as “the nation’s most generous first-book prize for poetry,” Walter will receive $5,000 and be gifted a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy.
Additionally, the Academy of American Poets will feature Walter’s poetry on their website and in American Poets, its biannual members’ magazine which goes out to ten thousand readers and serves as a platform for new work by both upcoming and established poets.
About Walter’s winning manuscript, Chang wrote: “The beautiful and meditative poems in Little Mercy are painterly, showcasing a perceptive speaker with a keen eye. These poems quietly and gently ask us to look at all the natural beauty and cruelty (but mostly beauty) we face each day, every minute, every second of our strange time on this earth.”
“Deeply humbled and moved”
Currently, Walter teaches as an instructor in the Department of Equine Science and has been a major contributor to the interdisciplinary Green & Gold Initiative on campus. Upon learning the big news, her gratitude and delight felt immeasurable.
“I am so deeply humbled and moved that this little family of words found their way beneath the generous light of Victoria Chang’s attention and care,” said Walter.
“That a poet whose ethos and vision I admire so sincerely found in these words something to share and selected Little Mercy as the winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award is the gift and honor of a lifetime. My deep and abiding thanks to the Academy of American Poets for its belief in this book and for ushering it into the world. Receiving this happy news in a phone call from Ricky Maldonado is a thrill I will cherish for the rest of my life.”
During her time in the MFA program at CSU, Walter was mentored by Professor and University Distinguished Teaching Scholar Dan Beachy-Quick. As someone who has read her work often and deeply, Beachy-Quick was eager to praise Walter for the way her poetry notices the world and translates that awareness into an emotional response in readers.
“Robin Walter’s Little Mercy is a quiet book attuned to the wonder of the world,” said Beachy-Quick.
“She writes with a haiku master’s fine eye for lived detail, but with a heart as expansive as Whitman’s wide song. Her work is a model of care for a world we ourselves have put in danger, and a kind guidebook to how it is we can live attentively, not apart from the world, but a part of it.”
To learn more about the Academy of American Poets and read the full award announcement, visit Poets.org.
About Robin Walter
Robin Walter was born in Colorado Springs. She received a BA from Colorado College and an MFA from Colorado State University. Her honors include an Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize from Colorado State University, and the Merriam Frontier Award for Poetry. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins.
About Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s books of poems include, most recently, With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024); The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), which was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New Yorker and the Guardian; Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021); and OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), a National Book Award nominee and winner of the 2018 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. The recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2023 Chowdhury Prize in Literature, Chang served as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine in 2022 and was the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor in May 2019. She lives in Los Angeles.
About the Academy of American Poets
Celebrating its ninetieth anniversary in 2024, the Academy of American Poets is a leading publisher of contemporary poetry across the country. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program. It also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to educators; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture.
