New York, NY (April 3, 2024)—Celebrated poet Victoria Chang has selected Robin Walter’s upcoming debut Little Mercy as the recipient of the 2024 Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award.

Walter’s manuscript will be published by Graywolf Press, a leading nonprofit publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in the United States, in April 2025. She will receive $5,000 plus a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy. The Academy of American Poets will feature Walter’s poetry on Poets.org and in American Poets, its biannual members’ magazine which goes out to ten thousand readers and serves as a platform for new work by both upcoming and established poets. The Academy will also purchase thousands of copies of Little Mercy to send to its members, making it one of the most widely distributed poetry books of the year. About Walter’s winning manuscript, Chang wrote:  

“The beautiful and meditative poems in Little Mercy are painterly, showcasing a perceptive speaker with a keen eye. These poems quietly and gently ask us to look at all the natural beauty and cruelty (but mostly beauty) we face each day, every minute, every second of our strange time on this earth. They ask us to look again and again at the daily transparent beauties in the natural world. The first person speaker is the one asking us, but this person is barely in the poems, reminding me of the Chinese landscape paintings where the mountain is huge and the person is tiny in a corner. Nature in these paintings and in these poems is to be revered. There are small trumpets of beauty everywhere in these poems: ‘In the dry season, // timothy grass / comes into the sleeve // of its stem // & the creek slips // underground / without anyone’s // noticing.’ This isn’t entirely true because the speaker of these melodious and wise poems has noticed."