Glenna Luchei Prize for African Poetry

The Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, under the auspices of the African Poetry Book Fund and in partnership with the literary journal, Prairie Schooner, is an annual award of USD $1,000. Established in 2015 and named for the literary philanthropist Glenna Luschei, this Pan African Poetry Prize is the only one of its kind in the world and aims to honor and promote African poetry written in English or in translation and to recognize a significant book published each year by an African poet.

2015 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

2015 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

A Book of Rooms

Kobus Moolman

“Moolman’s poems in this collection are electric, visceral, brilliantly experimental, and profoundly moving.” In Moolman’s book each poem is named for and unfolds the world of a specific room: The Room of Spillage, The Room of Maybe, The Room of Green, and more. As Baderoon explains the sense of movement through the collection, “In this close reading of spaces, we trace walls, windows, curtains, corners, our attention caught by the cut beneath the door, illumination flaring from glints of memory…. Yet if his flesh is betrayed, and his heart breaks into silence and shame, the hole in his heart also opens into speech. (More) Gabeba Baderoon.
2014 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

2014 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

Through the Window of a Sandcastle,

Amu Nnadi

“We come face to face with a truly original voice. [Nnadi] creates new metaphors, new spaces of being, and new cartographies of the African soul. There are traces here of Christopher Okigbo’s striking vision and voice, of Eliot’s sense of epic, of Walcott’s ability to turn quotidian diction into a song of light, and yet a melancholy, a brilliance, a dance that is all original, all amu nnadi.” — Chris Abani, Nigerian poet and novelist, PEN Award and Guggenheim winner Parresia Press, 2013. 978-9783157446