Meet the Black queer creatives who just won the “genius” award
Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal and received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
His third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His poems have appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Time, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.A post shared by MacArthur Foundation (@macfound)As a classically trained dancer, Pitts is known for creating multidisciplinary performances incorporating unique lighting, projection, electronic music, fashion, and other elements through an Afro-futuristic lens. “I love dance because of its power and capacity to communicate nonverbal language; there’s a lot of poetry in motion, and there’s the possibility to connect to many different things at the same time,” he says.
