Poet Gregory Pardlo: 'I won the Pulitzer: why am I invisible?'

Pardlo, Saeed Jones, Cate Marvin and Willie Perdomo excoriated the publishing industry for its lack of writers not white and male at a Manhattan panel

“One of the things I run into surprisingly often is people saying to me, ‘I’ve never heard of you before,’” says poet Gregory Pardlo. “Yet I’ve been publishing in ‘mainstream’ journals and my book won that prize, so what is it that is making me invisible? It’s not the work and it’s not the publishing credits.”

“That prize” Pardlo references is the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, which he won for his book Digest. Pardlo, a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, was honored Monday night at a “diversity in publishing” panel jointly sponsored by Cuny and Pen American. He was joined by fellow poets Saeed Jones, Cate Marvin, and Willie Perdomo for the event, which came on the heels of a report claiming that the publishing industry is 89% white– hence the suggestion that the mysterious thing keeping these writers invisible is the fact that none are white men.