Brooklyn-based poet Tom Sleigh has won the $100,000 US Kingsley Tufts Award, one of the world's largest prizes for poetry, for his collection Space Walk.

The prize, first awarded in 1993, is given to an emerging poet who has not yet received great fame or success.

Sleigh teaches at Dartmouth College in New York and is also author of The Chain, After One and The Dreamhouse.

Janice N. Harrington won the $10,000 US Kate Tufts Discovery Award, given to a poet who has published a debut collection, for Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone.

Harrington, who lives in Champaign, Ill., is the author of two children's books, Going North and The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County.

The awards were created by Kate Tufts in honour of her late husband, poet Kingsley Tufts.

Winners were announced Tuesday by Claremont Graduate University, which administers the awards.

Another $20,000 US book prize, the Lincoln Prize for Civil War scholarship, went to two U.S. historians.

They are:

  • James Oakes, professor of history at City University of New York and author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, an examination of the relationship between Lincoln and abolitionist Douglass.
  • Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, a biography of the famous Confederate general.

Pryor is also a senior adviser to the Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe for the U.S. Congress.

With files from the Associated Press