Minneapolis-based Milkweed Edition has announced that Michael Kleber-Diggs, of St. Anthony Park, has won the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, and “Wordly Things,” his poetry manuscript will be published in June 2021. In addition to publication, Kleber-Diggs will receive $10,000.
Henri Cole, a prominent American poet, selected this year’s winning manuscript. He writes the following about the “Wordly Things” poems: “Michael Kleber-Diggs’ 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.”
