A few weeks after winning the National Book Award, poet Ruth Stone, Bartle emerita professor of English, has won the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Prize. Given annually, the $150,000 award, which was announced December 23, recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Stone, 87, said she was “stunned, humbled and made jubilant” by the recognition. In explaining why the committee chose Stone, former Vermont Poet Laureate Galway Kinnell, one of the prize’s five judges, wrote: “Ruth Stone’s poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory. Her poems are experiences, not the record of experiences. They are events, interactions between the poet and the world. They happen — there on the page before us and within us — surprising and inevitable.”