2025 Centre for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) Book Prize | $3,000 Cash Prize

the CAAPP Book Prize is a publishing partnership between the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn Hous

2025 Centre for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) Book Prize

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 American, African, or 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, Jacqui Germain's Bittering the Wound, Richard Hamilton's Discordant, Okwudili Nebeolisa's Terminal Maladies, and Jasmine Reid's forthcoming Interlocutor Goddess.

The reading period opens on December 15, 2024, and is open until February 15, 2025.

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Other Ongoing Writing Competitions

• The Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest 2025 | $150 Cash Prize
• St. Gallen Symposium Global Essay Competition 2025 | CHF 20,000
• 2025 Centre for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) Book Prize | $3,000 Cash Prize 
• Deep Wild Journal's Waking to the Wild 2025 Student Contest
• The James Laughlin Award 2025 | $5,000 Cash Prize and Residency 
• The 2025 Zócalo Poetry Prize Honors Poems of Place | $1,000 Cash Prize 
• Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize | $3500 Cash Prizes 
• Pennacle's Pen on Fire Writing Competition and Workshop 2025

Submission Guidelines 

1. Please submit a manuscript between 48-168 pages.
2. Please submit your manuscript as a doc, docx, or pdf file.
3. Only one manuscript submission is permitted per person.

Final Judge: Cameron Awkward-Rich

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry—Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) andDispatch (Persea Books, 2019)—as well asThe Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). His writing has appeared, in various forms, in American Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Signs, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and the ACLS. Presently, he is an associate professor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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