Center for African American Poetry and Poetics

Center for African American Poetry and Poetics The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics is a creative think tank for African American and African diasporic poetries and poetics.

Our mission is to highlight, promote, and share the work of African American and African diasporic poets.

🗣🎉 🥳 CAAPP & AutumnHousePress are thrilled to announce E. HUGHES as the winner of the 2026 CAAPP Book Prize!Congratulati...
08/18/2026

🗣🎉 🥳 CAAPP & AutumnHousePress are thrilled to announce E. HUGHES as the winner of the 2026 CAAPP Book Prize!

Congratulations E. Hughes!!

E. Hughes’ manuscript, ANOTHER WAY TO SAY DYING, was selected as the winner by this year’s final judge Ladan and will be published by Autumn House in 2027. E. will also receive a $3,000 award prize in addition to publication.

E. Hughes is the author of the poetry collection Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, which was longlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and The Rumpus—among others. Hughes is a graduate fellow of Cave Canem and a 2025 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, Library Laureate. Currently, Hughes is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Emory University, where they are completing a dissertation titled Without Ground: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Unbeing.

🎊 We’d also like to congratulate this year’s Finalists:

2026 CAAPP Book Prize Finalists:
Samaa Abdurraqib…Pitch of Survival
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin…COLOSSUS
Kami Enzie…River of Love
Nabila Lovelace…Hate Me Now or Wife
NEVE…You’ve Got Your Teeth,You’ve Got Your Man
Rodrick Minor…The Potlikkers
Kéchi Nne Nomu…Boy Saints
Christell Victoria Roach…Overtown Crown
Derold Ernest Sligh…If my Heart were a City
Breauna L. White…Antecedent To A Hex

🗓 Stay Tuned for news about next year’s prize!

🗣️ Join us & at 6pm on Thur. 5/28 in Pittsburgh (ahead of ) in celebration of Meredith Nnoka’s LES PORTES. Meredith () ...
05/12/2026

🗣️ Join us & at 6pm on Thur. 5/28 in Pittsburgh (ahead of ) in celebration of Meredith Nnoka’s LES PORTES. Meredith () will be joined by Cameron Awkward-Rich ()—who selected LES PORTES as the Winner for the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize.

The event serves as our first CAAPP event held in the new CAAPP-Jazz Performance Theatre that we share with pitt_jazz studies (at the new Hill District CEC )

ADDRESS: 2007 Centre Avenue
(Entrance on Wylie Ave side)!

Meredith Nnoka (they/she) is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of Les Portes, winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, and the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman (O, Miami, 2023) and A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music (C&R Press, 2016). Nnoka holds a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, both in Africana studies. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of three collections of poetry:  Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), and An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025). Cameron’s creative work can be found in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation.
Cameron’s critical/scholarly writing can be found, among other places, in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, and American Quarterly. His book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022) was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in LGBTQ literature and cultural studies.
Presently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

04/30/2026

đź—Ł Here's an amazing event this weekend with a special CAAPP discount (info below) for our local community!

Please join us and for the Pittsburgh premier of Be Holding, commissioned for the 59th Carnegie International. Be Holding is written and performed by Ross Gay, joined on the court by David Gaines, directed by Brooke O'Harra, scored by Tyshawn Sorey and performed by Yarn/Wire.

The poem connects Dr. J’s iconic move to pickup basketball, the flying Igbo, the Middle Passage, photography, surveillance, state violence, music, and personal histories of flight and familial love. The performance uses the exchange of words, sounds, and movements— and the shared presence of performers and witnesses—to create an atmosphere of collective discovery and possibility

Saturday and Sunday, May 2 and 3, 7:30 p.m.

Thelma Lovette YMCA, 2114 Centre Ave, Pittsburgh, PA

$47 general admission, $35 Carnegie Museums members and for CAAPP Friends using the discount code BeHoldingCM

carnegieart.org/be-holding

CAAPP is excited to support these events with which feature interdisciplinary artist and choreographer Jasmine Hearn. C...
04/17/2026

CAAPP is excited to support these events with which feature interdisciplinary artist and choreographer Jasmine Hearn. CAAPP is comping tickets for a Movement Workshop with Jasmine (on Saturday, April 18th), and is also offering discounted tickets for either of Jasmine's two Main Performances (Friday & Saturday, April 24th & 25th.).

Visit our website at caapp.pitt.edu for information on how to obtain these discounts and for info about Upcoming Events.

🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

Spectrum of Strength (Movement Workshop)

Saturday, April 18 | 12:00pm – 2:00pm

KST’s Alloy Studios | 5530 Penn Ave.

Choreographer and artist Jasmine Hearn guides an interdisciplinary workshop rooted in traditions, practices, and methodologies of improvisation, dance, somatics, performance, preservation, sound composition, care, and cooking. A workshop open to all bodies that want to move, imagine, remember, listen, and respond. 

***

Memory Fleet: Stay in the Circle (Main Performance)

Friday & Saturday, April 24 - 25 | 7:30pm - 8:30pm

Kelly Strayhorn Theater | 5941 Penn Av

A dynamic, dance-driven performance fueled by original music and poetry. Weaving together stories of labor and rest, it imagines the past, present, and future of Black people who mother and mentor. Jasmine performs alongside Melike Vivastine Konur, Bekezela Mguni, Ursula Payne, Staycee Pearl, and Alisha B. Wormsley, forming a powerful collective that carries these stories live, in the moment. 

Friday's performance includes a post-show discussion. 

🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

Photo Credit: Jakayla Monay

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Pittsburgh, PA
15260

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