December 9, 2024

via Poets & Writers

New York, NY—December 9, 2024—Poets & Writers today announced that Kimberly Blaeser, Angie Cruz, and Kiese Laymon will receive the 2025 Writers for Writers Award. Morgan Entrekin, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Peter Blackstock, of the independent publisher Grove Atlantic, will receive the 2025 Editor’s Award.

Award recipients are selected by a committee composed of current and past members of the Poets & Writers Board of Directors, chaired by literary agent Eric Simonoff. Of the 2025 honorees, Simonoff said: “These are extraordinary literary citizens who have each made tremendous contributions to the writing and publishing communities. They exemplify Poets & Writers’ core values of service and excellence, and we are delighted to recognize each one of them.”

The awards will be presented at Poets & Writers’ gala on March 24, 2025, in New York City. Dominique Raccah, publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, is this year's event chair.

THE WRITERS FOR WRITERS AWARD

The Writers for Writers Award was established by Poets & Writers in 1996 to recognize authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. As pillars and architects of culturally inclusive literary communities, this year’s recipients have each fostered spaces that celebrate and uplift other writers. 

Poet Kimberly Blaeser is being recognized for nurturing and mentoring Indigenous poets through Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), an organization she founded in 2020. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Ancient Light (University of Arizona Press, 2024) and served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2015–16. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Blaeser is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation, an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Novelist Angie Cruz was selected for the honor because of her leadership, advocacy, and community building. She is “una abridora de puertas” (a door opener)— especially for Latine writers. Cruz’s most recent novel, How Not to Drown in A Glass of Water (Flatiron Books, 2022), was a finalist for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and chosen for the New York Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2022." She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning literary journal Aster(ix).

Author Kiese Laymon was chosen for his generous contributions to other writers, which include establishing the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts, Food, and Justice Initiative, a unique literacy and cultural education program based at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, which he founded and named in honor of his grandmother, as well as co-founding LIT 16, an initiative to celebrate new voices. A MacArthur Fellow, Laymon is the author of the NAACP Image Award-winning novel Long Division (Scribner, 2021), the New York Times notable essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America (Scribner, 2020), and Heavy: An American Memoir (Scribner, 2018), which garnered numerous awards and was named one of the one hundred best books of the century by the New York Times. 

THE EDITOR'S AWARD

The Editor’s Award recognizes book editors who have made outstanding contributions to the publication of poetry or literary prose over a sustained period of time. For 2025, the awards selection committee made the unusual decision to honor not one but three Grove Atlantic editors jointly for their remarkable individual contributions to books of literary merit, as well as the collective and ongoing impact of Grove Atlantic on the literary conversation.

Morgan Entrekin, CEO and publisher of Grove Atlantic, started an imprint with Atlantic Monthly Press in 1985, publishing books by P. J. O’Rourke, Ron Chernow, and Francisco Goldman. In 1993, he merged Atlantic Monthly Press with Grove Press, the publisher of authors including Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. Authors he has published include Aminatta Forna, Jim Harrison, and Will Self. In 2015, he launched Literary Hub, a website celebrating books, authors, and literary culture that now draws over five million visitors a month.

Elisabeth Schmitz is vice president and editorial director of Grove Atlantic. Her authors have won the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Peter Blackstock is vice president and deputy publisher of Grove Atlantic. His authors have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the Edgar Award, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, among others. He is also the publisher of Grove Atlantic’s London-based imprint, Grove Press UK.

The honorees’ full biographies can be found here.

IN CELEBRATION OF WRITERS

Poets & Writers’ annual gala, In Celebration of Writers, will take place on Monday evening, March 24, 2025, at Pier Sixty in New York City. For tickets and additional information, visit pw.org/gala.

ABOUT POETS & WRITERS

Poets & Writers is the primary source of information, support, and guidance for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers in the United States. Our mission is to foster the professional development of poets and writers, to promote communication throughout the literary community, and to help create an environment in which literature can be appreciated by the widest possible public.

We advance this mission through Poets & Writers Magazine, the leading publication of its kind; a website that provides extensive resources for writers as well as a lively online community; professional development opportunities for writers; and grants that pay writers for giving readings and leading writing workshops in small towns and big cities throughout California and New York State. We sponsor the Jackson Poetry Prize and Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. We are guided by our core values of service, inclusivity, integrity, and excellence and are committed to becoming an antiracist organization. Learn more at pw.org.