San Diego Professor Kazim Ali Wins 2025 Pegasus Award For Poetry Criticism

Photo: Poetry Foundation

India-West News Desk

SAN DIEGO, CA — On the campus of the University of California, San Diego, Kazim Ali spends his days surrounded by books, students, and the quiet hum of creative energy. This fall, his work will travel far beyond the West Coast: Ali has been named the 2025 recipient of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism by the Poetry Foundation for his book ‘Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton’.

The award, which comes with a $10,000 prize, honors an outstanding book-length work of poetry criticism published in the U.S. over the past year.

In ‘Black Buffalo Woman’, Ali offers a rich, deeply researched look at Clifton’s poetry, celebrating her clarity, spiritual depth, and formal mastery. The runner-up for the award was Eleni Stecopoulos for ‘Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing’.

Alongside Ali, the Poetry Foundation also recognized Rigoberto González with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and Amy Stolls with the Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry. All three honorees will be celebrated at a ceremony in Chicago this October, and will take part in a free public reading at the Poetry Foundation on October 24.

‘It is the Poetry Foundation’s great honor to recognize the extraordinary talents of Rigoberto González, Amy Stolls, and Kazim Ali for dedicating their lives and careers to supporting poetry,’ said Michelle T. Boone, president and CEO of the Poetry Foundation.

Born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent, Ali has lived and worked across the U.S., Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. He holds a BA and MA from the University at Albany, SUNY, and an MFA from New York University.

Ali’s impressive body of work spans six poetry collections, six works of prose, and two novels. His collection ‘The Far Mosque’ won the New England/New York Award from Alice James Books, and his 2021 prose book ‘Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water’ received the Banff Mountain Book Award in Environmental Literature. He is also an accomplished translator, with works including Marguerite Duras’s ‘Abahn Sabana David’ and Ananda Devi’s ‘When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me’. In 2004, he co-founded Nightboat Books and served as its publisher until 2007.