CAAPP Book Prize

 

The 2024 CAAPP Book Prize, awarded with Autumn House Press and judged by aracelis girmay, will open its submissions on December 15, 2023. More submission details to come soon, but mark your calendars!

 

 

We are pleased to announce that the judge of the 2024 CAAPP Book prize will be aracelis girmay.

aracelis girmay is a poet who makes work across genres, including essays, collages, and picture books. She is the author of three books of poems, for which she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her most recent work is the chapbook and was a flower, made in collaboration with book artist Valentina Améstica. Other recent work has been published in Astra, The Paris Review online, and e-flux. girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the editor-at-large of the Blessing the Boats Selections (BOA Editions). She teaches at Stanford University.

 

 

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.

We are pleased to announce our 2023 Winner: Okwudili Nebeolisa for Terminal Maladies, selected by Nicole Sealey.

Okwudili's winning manuscript will be published by Autumn House Press in 2024.

Okwudili Nebeolisa is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggetts Prize for Fiction. For his poetry, he has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Granum Foundation. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Image, Salamander Magazine, The Sewanee Review, Strange Horizons, The Threepenny Review, and are forthcoming in Transition and Cutleaf, while his nonfiction has appeared in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He will begin an MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota this fall.

2023 CAAPP Book Prize Finalists:

Torli Bush..........American Psalms

Bryan Byrdlong..........Strange Flowers 

Delicia Daniels..........Abolition Chronicles 

Diamond Forde..........The Book of Alice 

Isra Hassan..........OPAQUE

Michal 'MJ' Jones.......... BLUFF

Mubanga Kalimamukwento..........Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies

JR Mahung..........Exodus; Expansion

Dani Janae..........Express Desire

Layla Benitez-James..........The Lush Alphabet

Jasmine Reid..........Interlocutor Goddess

 

We are pleased to announce that the judge of the 2023 CAAPP Book prize will be Nicole Sealey.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, for which an excerpt from the collection was awarded the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her honors include the 2021 Granum Foundation Prize, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the National Endowment and New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018 and 2021. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

Submit to the CAAPP Book Prize through Submittable


We are pleased to announce our 2022 Winner: Richard Hamilton for Discordant, selected by Evie Shockley.

Richard’s winning manuscript will be published by Autumn House Press in 2023.

Richard Hamilton was born in 1975 and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey and Columbus, Georgia. Their first book Rest of Us was published by Recenter Press in Philadelphia. A Cave Canem alumnus, their poetry has appeared in CONSEQUENCE magazine, Steel Toe Review, and The Drunken Boat. They live in Washington D.C.

 


 


2021 Winner: Jacqui Germain, Bittering the Wound, selected by Douglas Kearney

Jacqui’s winning manuscript will be published by Autumn House Press in 2022.


Photo of Jaqui Germaine with "Congratulations" and winning information repeated.

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

 

 


 

2020 Winner: Carly Inghram, The Animal Indoors, selected by Terrance Hayes
 

Carly’s winning manuscript will be published by Autumn House Press in 2021.

Photo of Carly Inghram with text: "Congratulations" + winning information repeated. More text: "Carly is a poet from Atlanta. She received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work is featured in The Indianapolis Review and Prelude, and her first collection, Sometimes the Blue Trees, was released from V.A press in 2019. Her cat, LIZO's, full birth name is Lorde (like Audre), Imari Zyrtec Ocean (like Frank). And he has an attitude about it."

"In The Animal Indoors, interior and exterior worlds blend with lyricism like 'the sudden violence of dry earth rising up in rain.' These poems sing as they please of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Frank Ocean, and America’s 'edges flittering in the small light.' Melancholy and joy overlap, clap and slap. The Animal Indoors is full of capacious, capricious edges. This poet straddles worlds."
–Terrance Hayes


Honorable Mention: Mia Willis, mud kitchen

Finalists, in alphabetical order:
M. Saida Agostini, just let the dead in
Wale Ayinla, Sea Blues on Water Meridian
Layla Benitez-James, Casí se besan
Joshua Burton, Waltz
Jason B. Crawford, The Year of the Unicorn Kidz
Jive Poetic, Yesterlock
Lolita Stewart-White, black frag/ments