The African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) promotes and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts through its book series, contests, workshops, and seminars and through its collaborations with publishers, festivals, booking agents, colleges, universities, conferences and all other entities that share an interest in the poetic arts of Africa.

The winner of APBF’s 2024 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets is Michael Imossan for his collection All That Refuses to Die. Imossan will receive a $1000 USD cash award and publication of his manuscript as part of the University of Nebraska Press’ African Poetry Book Series.

The judging panel for the Sillerman Prize consists of Chris Abani, Gabeba Baderoon, Aracelis Girmay, John Keene, Matthew Shenoda, Mahtem Shiferraw, and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, with Kwame Dawes, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and the Prairie Schooner’s Editor-in-Chief.

Award-winning poet, scholar, and professor Gabeba Baderoon praised All That Refuses to Die, writing that the manuscript’s “exquisite language, piercingly memorable lines [are] elegiac but with an insistence on beauty and love.”

Michael Imossan is an Ibibio poet from Nigeria. He is the author of the award-winning chapbook For the Love of Country and Memory (Poetrycolumnnd, 2022) and the pamphlet A Prelude to Caving (Konyashamsrumi, 2023).

The judges are also pleased to name two manuscripts as finalists: Adam Vomited the Apple by Animashaun Ameen and Ara’Luebo by Kanyinsola Olorunnisola.

Imossan is the twelfth poet to win the annual Sillerman Prize, following Abu Bakr Sadiq in 2023 for Leaked Footages, Tares Oburumu in 2022 for Origins of the Syma Species, and Sherry Shenoda in 2021 for Mummy Eaters.

The 2025 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets will be open September 15 through December 1 to submissions of manuscripts by African poets who have not yet published a full-length collection. For more information and to submit, click here.

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This announcement was originally shared by the African Poetry Book Fund.