The Hopwood Awards

The Hopwood Awards claim a gallery of prizewinners who rose to become the Who's Who of writers of the last three generations: Max Apple, John Ciardi, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Hayden, Laura Kasischke, Jane Kenyon, Arthur Miller, Howard Moss, Frank O'Hara, Marge Piercy, Ronald Wallace, and Nancy Willard, among many others.

Since they first began in 1931, funded by a bequest from the will of playwright Avery Hopwood, University of Michigan Class of 1905, the Hopwood Awards have grown in profile and stature to become one of the most sought after and celebrated writing prizes for students.

The Hopwood Awards: 75 Years of Prized Writing collects---for the first time in one volume---poetry and prose by writers who won Hopwood Awards when they were students at the University of Michigan and who went on to achieve fame as writers.

Nicholas Delbanco is Professor of English and Director of the Hopwood Program at the University of Michigan. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Anywhere Out of the World: Essays on Travel, Writing, Death; The Sincerest Form; and The Writing Life: The Hopwood Lectures.

Andrea Beauchamp is Program Associate at the Hopwood Program, and Michael Barrett is Associate Editor at the Hopwood Program, University of Michigan.

Praise / Awards

• "The Hopwood Awards, I believe, announced not merely annual winners but an attitude that has since spread through many other universities--that the writer can be just as valuable during his lifetime as he is afterward. . . . The recognition of an award touched more than the pocket."
  ---Arthur Miller
• "The Hopwood Foundation is the largest and most ambitious attempt to invigorate and sustain literature from without. . . . Its establishment was a profession of faith in the importance of literature to the society from which this aid was derived. . . . The donor implied a belief that literature is. . . a public enterprise, a part of the effort of humanity to live adequately, even richly and nobly, by employing all the resources of its environment; an effort which is the object of the university to promote, and which is symbolized in its name."
  ---Robert Morss Lovett
  
• "When I was a student here, I remember hearing about the Hopwood Awards each year; to me, they were just as awesome as the Nobel Prize--something simply unattainable, momentous, and vaguely Scandinavian. Okay, maybe not Scandinavian, but certainly of the greatest consequence, particularly to someone like me, who even then, at that tender and naïve time in my life, dreamed of being a writer."
  ---Susan Orlean
  
• "Expertly compiled and co-edited . . . The Hopwood Awards: Seventy-Five Years of Prized Writing is an impressive literary anthology of University of Michigan students who won the prestigious Hopwood Award for literature and showcasing three generations of these outstanding writers. . . . The Hopwood Awards presents an eminent compendium of intellectual literature."
  ---Library Bookwatch