We're celebrating Black Poetry Day this year by highlighting a few titles we've had the honor to publish. Get 30% off the following books by or about great Black poets with code 08BLKPOET at checkout.

Revolutionary Poetics

Sarah Rudewalker

"While there has been an upsurge of scholarship on the Black Arts Movement in the twenty-first century, no one has done what Sarah RudeWalker does in Revolutionary Poetics."
—James Smethurst, coeditor of SOS–Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader

Black Nature

Edited by Camille T. Dungy

"One of the few anthologies that can be picked up and read like a novel cover to cover without metaphor overload. Black Nature is well thought out, well edited, and timed."
—Phati'tude Literary Magazine

Phillis Wheatley Peters

Vincent Carretta

"Carretta's well-researched narrative succeeds in bringing the 'genius in bondage' out of history's shadows. . . . Wheatley Peters emerges from the pages of Carretta's biography as a resourceful poet who played an active role in the production and distribution of her own writing on both sides of the Atlantic."
—Times Literary Supplement

Bouquet of Hungers

Kyle Dargan

"Dargan's voice is fresh, yet speaks with the received wisdom of forebears, literary and otherwise. He takes risks with diction and form, and grounds his eclectic exploration of subjects in a quest for truth-telling and understanding. His careful pruning of language, with attention to nuances of Black vernacular; his taut yet fluid syntax; and his 'saturation' of imagery give Dargan's best poems swagger and heart."
—Sharan Strange, author of Ash

After a Thousand Tears

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Edited by Jimmy Worthy II

"This book is a welcomed daylighting of work by the prolific and profound twentieth-century writer Georgia Douglas Johnson. It is a valuable, perhaps even an invaluable, asset to scholarly communities in literature, Black studies, gender studies, history, and more."
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

South Flight

Jasmine Elizabeth Smith

"South Flight, winner of the 2021 Georgia Poetry Prize, is an angry, heartsick lesson in the American history of brutal racial hatred, a history of routine lynchings and spasmodic massacres. . . These slashing, jagged poems are vibrant with the pain that has been the legacy of modern American Black people, resonating with the anger at injustice that is at the heart of Black Lives Matter."
—Patrick T. Reardon, Another Chicago magazine

A Body of Water

Chioma Urama

"From the ‘pastoral violence of Virginia childhood’ to the fabled complexity of an American universe, these poems take us through the protean intersections of history and geography, kinsfolk and folkways, the racial self and the othering world, sobering cogitations and regenerative laughter. Here are the songs of a poet who, like the African griot, is energized by an abiding faith in the restorative power of the Word, one capable of dreaming ‘the word that/would save us all.’"
—Niyi Osundare, author of If Only the World Could Talk

Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers

Frank X. Walker

"Having labored in the world of the arts and in particular in the vineyards of poetry over the last fifty years, I am seldom surprised, moved or excited about the many voices-new and experienced-who occupy our rather fragile and inclusive world. Frank X Walker is an exception. His unusually perceptive and original voice commands a seat at the table. That which separates most poets is their use of language and their ability to creatively keep us reading and listening to their concept of the world we all love, live, and fight in. Read this poet."
—Haki R. Madhubuti, author of Honoring Genius: Gwendolyn Brooks—The Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness, and Justice

Established in 1999, this first book award is dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts by African American poets who have not been professionally published. The winner will receive $1,000 cash, publication, and fifty copies of their book.

Winner, contest judge, and finalists are also featured in a public reading in New York City, co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Winning volumes are published on a revolving basis by the University of Georgia Press, the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Graywolf Press.

Submission Guidelines

Black Pastoral

Ariana Benson

"Ariana Benson uses all the linguistic wizardry, emotional honesty, and formal dazzle at her disposal to bring us the fields and forests as she finds them: colonized, exploited, but still wild, and filled with what history has made Blackness mean."
—Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic

The Listening 

Kyle Dargan

"Dargan shows a wide breadth of talent, from writing what he calls neo-slave narratives to heartbreaking pieces on his own family history. . . . Dargan uses wit and incisive observations to document race in America. Beneath it all are the rhythms and tensions of Newark, which infuse many of Dargan's poems."
—Newark Star-Ledger

Semiotics

Chekwube Danladi

Activating a many-layered language that is at once political and delicate, Danladi conjures the unsightly and the sacred across poems that are vigilant, penetrating, and deeply evocative.

Begin with a Failed Body

Natalie J. Graham

"Poems that speak both to the richness and ruin of history and teem with all that is earthy and corporeal."
—Julia Bouwsma, Poetry Northwest

Leaving Saturn

Major Jackson

"Jackson is in step, but he's also out there on the sidelines watching, with a keen eye for the tender moment, a rage at unfairness, a clever perception of vision where others might see only craziness. With such an auspicious beginning, what a future lies ahead of him."
—New Orleans Times-Picayune

A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering

Dawn Lundy Martin

"A deep and exhausting exploration of the human body and every possible equation regarding gender, identity, race, and sexuality. It is obvious this prose poet has done something unique."
—Bloomsbury Review

Spit Back a Boy

Iain Haley Pollock

"Iain Haley Pollock’s debut volume Spit Back A Boy. . . .is a shapeshifter that keeps saying, in so many different ways, how varied, how complex the African-American poetic idiom is, how complex the American poetic idiom is."
—Jake Adam York, On the Seawall

Zero to Three 

F. Douglas Brown

"From the hectic blur of family dynamics amidst raising young children, F. Douglas Brown’s Zero to Three reminds us there is much to learn about what shapes parents into better people."
—Samantha Duncan, The Rumpus

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