Georgia Tech’s Victoria Chang Wins Prestigious Forward Prize

Victoria Chang, Georgia Tech’s Bourne Chair in Poetry, has been named the winner of the prestigious UK poetry award The Forward Prize for best poetry collection.

Chang won for her new volume, With My Back to the World, inspired by the work of artist Agnes Martin. The Forward Foundation, which administers the prize, said the book explores art, depression, and isolation “in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do, exploring the nature of the self, existence, life and death.”

The prize comes with a £10,000 award.

“I wasn’t expecting to be shortlisted for such an incredible book prize, let alone to win the award. I read all the books on the shortlist this summer and felt that every book could have easily received the award, which just makes winning the prize that much more rewarding,” Chang said.

Chang is the director of Poetry@Tech and teaches in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. 

Her previous works have earned her the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and a PEN Center USA Literary Award, a California Book Award. Her previous collection of poems, OBIT, also was long-listed for a National Book Award.

Chang, the first Asian-American and first woman to hold the Bourne Chair, helps lead Poetry@Tech’s esteemed reading series and teaches the craft of poetry to students from across Georgia Tech. The craft is particularly relevant to Georgia Tech’s STEM students, she noted in a 2023 article introducing her to campus.

“Poetry is organized disorder, or disorderly organization. It requires organized thinking,” said Chang. “It’s a technical craft that comes from who-knows-where — this amazing combination of pattern, mystery, the unknown, and the unsayable,” Chang said.

For more information about poetry on the Georgia Tech campus, visit Poetry@Tech’s website.