Submissions for the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize will open on December 15, 2022.

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. Previous winners include Carly Inghram's The Animal Indoors, Jacqui Germain's Bittering the Wound, and Richard Hamilton's forthcoming Discordant.

2023 CAAPP Book Prize

• The reading period opens on December 15, 2022, and is open until February 15, 2023.
• Please submit a manuscript between 48-168 pages.
• Please submit your manuscript as a doc, docx, or pdf file.
• Only one manuscript submission is permitted per person.
• Final Judge: Nicole Sealey

About the Final Judge: 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. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.