Founded in 2020, the CAAPP Book Prize is a publishing partnership between the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press with the goal of publishing and promoting a writer of African descent. The prize is awarded annually to a first or second book by a writer of African descent and is open to the full range of writers embodying African and African diasporic experiences.
The book can be of any genre that is, or intersects with, poetry, including poetry, hybrid work, speculative prose, and/or translation. The winning manuscript will be published by Autumn House Press and its author will be awarded $3,000. Previous winners include Carly Inghram's The Animal Indoors and Jacqui Germain's forthcoming Bittering the Wound.
- The deadline is February 15, 2022.
- Please submit a manuscript between 48-168 pages.
- Please submit your manuscript as a doc, docx, or pdf file.
- Submit here.
Final Judge: Evie Shockley
Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections, the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the latter was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared internationally in print and audio formats, in English and in translation. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem, among others. Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.