Derf gets Cleveland Arts Prize award

Former BJ artist John Backderf won the Cleveland Arts Prize Mid-Career Award.

His autobiographical graphic novel “My Friend Dahmer,” the story of his junior high and high school friendship with future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was turned into a movie, released last year and filmed partially at Dahmer’s childhood home in Bath.

Derf grew up in Richfield.

Poet and Akron native Rita Dove won the 2018 Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dove won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for “Thomas and Beulah,” poems about life in Akron as witnessed by her grandparents.

She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 1993, the youngest ever at age 40 and the first African-American.

She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

The 58th annual awards ceremony will be October 21 at the Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.