Claremont Graduate University recently announced its 2025 Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award winners, Jaswinder Bolina and Ariana Benson.

Both will be honored April 23 at Los Angeles Public Library’s Taper Auditorium, 630 W. Fifth St., during a free and open to the public 7 p.m. reading and Q&A.

Bolina’s “English as a Second Language and Other Poems” (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, which is given to a book by a mid-career poet and comes with a $100,000 prize. Bolina is a poet and chair of the English and creative writing departments at the University of Miami.

Benson’s “Black Pastoral” (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which honors a poet’s first book and carries a $10,000 prize. “Black Pastoral” also won the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Both works are said to “offer their audiences fresh insights and perhaps a moment of respite as they navigate questions of identity and belonging,” according to a recent CGU article.

“Bolina invites readers to reconsider the fluidity of language, the strangeness of what we deem normal, and the ways in which culture shapes our understanding of both,” the article read. “Benson hopes Black Pastoral will challenge audiences’ understanding of the past, particularly in relation to Black Americans.”

For more information, visit cgu.edu/news.