New York, NY (September 12, 2023)—The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that poet Elizabeth Bradfield and climate scientist Kate Marvel, PhD, will judge the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, the Academy’s first poetry prize to address climate change, established in 2019 with generous support from Treehouse Investments, LLC. Three poets will be honored: first place will receive $1,000; second place, $750; and third place, $500. In addition, all three poems will be published in the popular Poem-a-Day series, which is distributed to 500,000+ readers. Poems may also be featured in the award-winning education series Teach This Poem, which serves 40,000+ educators each week. 

Submissions will be accepted online from September 15, 2023, through November 15, 2023 (11:59 p.m. EST). The winning poets will be announced on Monday, April 22, 2024, which is Earth Day.

For more information about the prize, visit: www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/treehouse-climate-action-poem-prize 

About Elizabeth Bradfield

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books, 2019) and Once Removed (Persea Books, 2015), and co-editor of the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023) and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005–2020 (Broadsided Press, 2022). Her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry for her first book, Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books, 2008), and a Stegner Fellowship. Bradfield grew up in Tacoma and now lives on Cape Cod, where she works as a naturalist and field assistant. She teaches at Brandeis University, runs Broadsided Press, and is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review. Learn more at www.ebradfield.com. 

About Kate Marvel

Kate Marvel, PhD, is a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown, the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. Before joining Project Drawdown, Kate spent seven years as a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University and held positions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University. A former cosmologist, Marvel received a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge University, where she was a Gates Scholar. She serves on the chapter leadership team of the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment, has given a TED talk, appeared on Meet the Press and The Ezra Klein Show, and testified before the U.S. Congress. Her research centers on climate modeling to better predict how much the Earth’s temperature will rise in the future, and her work has identified human influences on present-day cloud cover, rainfall patterns, and drought risk. Her book Human Nature will be published by Ecco Press in 2023. 

About the Academy of American Poets

Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the United States’ leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states and beyond. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program, which includes the Poet Laureate Fellowships. The organization also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to K–12 educators, including the award-winning weekly Teach This Poem series; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, including its staff, its Board of Directors, and its Board of Chancellors, visit: https://poets.org.

About Treehouse Investments

Treehouse Investments, LLC, is a minority-owned infrastructure investment firm dedicated to addressing climate change. Treehouse focuses on decentralized infrastructure because it believes that infrastructure provides the foundation on which all other human endeavors are built, and decentralized solutions incorporate the resilience our world increasingly needs