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 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.
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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.