Los Angeles Times Book Prize: poetry

The Los Angeles Times has honored books annually since 1980. Currently, it does so in many categories that include, among others, biography, current interest, fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, and young adult fiction. Works are eligible regardless of the language in which they were originally published, but not until the year of their first U.S. publication in English.  The prizes are normally presented before the start of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, another annual event sponsored by the newspaper.

2023: Bread and Circus: Poems, by Airea D. Matthews

2022: Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, by Dionne Brand

2021: frank: sonnets, by Diana Seuss

2020: Obit, by Victoria Chang

2019: Deaf Republic: Poems, by Ilya Kaminsky

2018: Wild is the Wind: Poems, by Carl Phillips 

2017: Incendiary Art: Poems, by Patricia Smith

2016: Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, by Rosmarie Waldrop

2015: From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, by Jorie Graham

2014: Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine

2013: Collected Poems, by Ron Padgett

2012: Poems 1962-2012, by Louise Glück

2011: Double Shadow: Poems, by Carl Phillips

2010: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, by Maxine Kumin

2009: Practical Water, by Brenda Hillman

2008: Watching the Spring Festival: Poems, by Frank Bidart

2007: Old Heart: Poems, by Stanley Plumly

2006: Ooga-Booga, by Frederick Seidel

2005: Refusing Heaven: Poems, by Jack Gilbert

2004: Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003, by Richard Howard

2003: Collected Later Poems, by Anthony Hecht

2002: The Watercourse: Poems, by Cynthia Zarin

2001: The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, by Anne Carson

2000: The Throne of Labdacus, by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

1999: Repair: Poems, by C.K. Williams

1998: Mysteries of Small Houses, by Alice Notley

1997: Black Zodiac, by Charles Wright

1996: Mixed Company, by Alan Shapiro

1995: The Inferno of Dante, by Robert Pinsky

1994: The Angel of History, by Carolyn Forché

1993: My Alexandria, by Mark Doty

1992: An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, by Adrienne Rich

1991: What Work Is, by Philip Levine

1990: The Color of Mesabi Bones, by John Caddy

1989: The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts, by Donald Hall

1988: New and Collected Poems, by Richard Wilbur

1987: Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems, by William Meredith

1986: Collected Poems, 1948-1984, by Derek Walcott

1985: Cross Ties, by X.J. Kennedy

1984: The Maximus Poems, by Charles Olson

1983: The Changing Light at Sandover, by James Merrill

1982: Plutonian Ode and Other Poems, 1977-1980, by Allen Ginsberg

1981: Three Pieces, by Ntozake Shange)

1980: Kill the Messenger, by Robert Kelly