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.
2022 CAAPP Book Prize
- The reading period opens on December 10, 2021, and is open until February 15, 2022.
- Please submit a manuscript between 48 and 168 pages.
- 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.
2021 Winner: Jacqui Germain, Bittering the Wound, selected by Douglas Kearney
Jacqui’s winning manuscript will be published by Autumn House Press in 2022.
Honorable Mention: Leon Baham, The Book of Imaginary Boys
Finalists, in alphabetical order:
Micky Bayonne, Goldfish Reunion
Layla Benitez-James, Lush Alphabet
Hazem Fahmy, Semaphore
Ahja Fox, What Holds You at Night
Sherese Francis, PollyNation: The Seminary of Self
Destiny Hemphill, The MOTHERWORLD Devotions
Dani Janae, Motherless Fruit
Nawal Nader, an improvised song is likely to come apart and scatter in infinite directions
Olatunde Osinaike, Tender Headed
Krystle Statler, Threnody on Repeat