A faculty member from Florida State University’s Department of English has been selected to receive the prestigious Louisiana Writer Award, presented by the Louisiana Center for the Book in the State Library of Louisiana.
Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor David Kirby is the 25th recipient of the award, which recognizes contemporary Louisiana authors who have made outstanding contributions to that state’s literary and intellectual life through their body of work. Past awardees include writers Ernest J. Gaines, John Kennedy Toole, Elmore Leonard and Yusef Komunyakaa.
The award holds special significance for Kirby, a poet and author who was born and raised in Louisiana, on a small farm outside of Baton Rouge.
“There’s a sense of joy that’s almost unimaginable in receiving this award because that’s where I grew up. To be recognized by the place you grew up, that’s elemental, that’s foundational.”
— David Kirby, Department of English professor
“There’s a sense of joy that’s almost unimaginable in receiving this award because that’s where I grew up,” Kirby said. “To be recognized by the place you grew up, that’s elemental, that’s foundational. It gets back to mythology and legend — I’m being honored by a state that I was born into, I didn’t yet know who I was or have anything to say. I grew up all around it and thought that was the world until I found out that there were actually other states, other people.”
The Louisiana Writer Award is the latest in a lengthy list of honors Kirby has achieved during his more than five decades at FSU. Some of his most notable achievements include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a W. Guy McKenzie Tenured Professorship, a College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Award, four University Teaching Awards, two Teaching Incentive Program Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Fellowship, an FSU Distinguished Teacher Award and the Florida Humanities Council’s Florida Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing.
Kirby, the author of nearly 40 books to date, is also a National Book Award finalist. His latest publications include a collection of poetry titled “The Winter Dance Party: Poems 1983-2023,” and a textbook titled “The Knowledge: Where Poems Come from and How to Write Them,” which took Kirby just six weeks to complete.
“I thought about all of the syllabi, I had all of the exercises, all the prompts, all the speeches I’d given, and I just cracked my knuckles,” Kirby said. “It was the easiest thing I did. So, these two books were kind of my whole life in 600 pages.”
In 2020, the David Kirby Fellowship within Creative Writing was organized to honor Kirby’s 50 years of teaching at Florida State. The fellowship was endowed and today supports the general needs and priorities of the university’s creative writing program, including providing stipend supplements and funding graduate student travel to conferences and invited lectures.
“This Louisiana Writer Award is one in a long line of accolades and, as a Louisiana native, is surely of special importance to David,” said Sam Huckaba, dean of the FSU College of Arts and Sciences. “It is a pleasure to congratulate him. The Louisiana Writer Award is meaningful, prestigious and another reflection of the high-quality scholarship flowing from the college and the Department of English.”
Kirby will accept the award Saturday, Nov. 2, at the 2024 Louisiana Book Festival in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The festival marks its 20th anniversary this year, with more than 200 authors and presenters taking part. The official artwork for this year’s festival, “Come to Find Out” by Louisiana artist Kelly A. Mueller, also features an ode to Kirby’s body of work.
“When we first began discussion about the design for this year’s Louisiana Book Festival, conversations quickly centered on the fact that I regularly include projected text in my work,” Mueller said. “Here, we saw it as an opportunity to celebrate this year’s recipient of the 25th Louisiana Writer Award, David Kirby. In the image, a writer sits quietly working at a window at dusk, while the surrounding cypress swamp comes to life.”
Excerpts from some of Kirby’s poems with a Louisiana connection can also be seen within Mueller’s artwork, including “Come to Find Out,” along with numbers commemorating the 20th book festival, the 25th Louisiana Writer Award, and the 40 years of Kirby’s poems featured in “The Winter Dance Party.”
Kirby will also be honored at the Senate Chamber of the Louisiana Capitol by Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser during his visit.
“David Kirby has never forgotten where he came from, which is obvious in his work, with Louisiana often his inspiration,” Nungesser said. “He’s the type of author the Louisiana Writer Award was established to recognize – not only for his poetry, but David also moves effortlessly among genres.”
Although Kirby has returned to Louisiana many times since his childhood, each return, he said, is uniquely inspiring.
“My parents are no longer living and the farm I grew up on has drastically changed,” Kirby said. “So, in many ways, it’s a world I don’t recognize. But I’ll walk down the street and hear someone speak in the kind of dialect heard only in that part of the world, or I’ll run into an old classmate, and just like a special effect in a movie, I kind of bounce back through time. That’s where poetry comes from — that conversation between here and now, between the present and the past.”
To learn more about Kirby’s work and the FSU Department of English, visit english.fsu.edu.