Mark Strand, the Andrew Macleish Distinguished Service Professor on the Committee of Social Thought and renowned poet, has received this year’s Wallace Stevens Award.

The Wallace Stevens Award, given by the Academy of American Poets, recognizes a poet for demonstrated mastery of his craft, and includes a stipend of $100,000. Awards of such magnitude are nothing new for Strand, who served as the poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his last work, Blizzard of One, published in 1998.

Strand also won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, in 1977 and 1986, and a MacArthur fellowship in 1987. The Wallace Stephens Award, however, is different for poets, because it comes from a panel of their peers. As it happens, Strand is teaching a seminar course on Stevens this quarter.

Strand, who has published nine books of poetry, is currently working on a manuscript of poems to be published by the summer of 2006.