Congratulations to the 2023 - 2024 Poetic Justice Book Prize Winners!
We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2023-2024 Poetic Justice Institute Book Prizes!
Winners receive $1,000, and their winning volumes will be published by Fordham University Press in Fall 2025.
Poetic Justice Institute Prize Winner:
Marcella Durand for A Winter Triangle
Selected by Srikanth Reddy
Marcella Durand is the author of To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2021), The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020), Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017) and Le Jardin de M. (joca seria, 2016), with French translations by Olivier Brossard. Her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Earth's Horizons/Les Horizons du sol, was published by Black Square Editions in 2020. She is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art and lives in the Lower East Side of New York City, where she is active in local ecological issues.
Author photo credit: Andrew Zawacki
Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC Writer, Winner:
Adedayo Agarau for The Years of Blood
Selected by Elisabeth Frost and JoAnne McFarland
Adedayo Agarau is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Cave Canem Fellow. He obtained his MFA in 2023 at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he won the Deena Davidson Friedman Scholarship, the John C. Shupe Scholarship, and the 2023 Summer scholarship from The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His poems have been featured in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Society of America, World Literature Today and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbooks, “Origin of Names” (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020), and “The Arrival of Rain” (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). Adedayo is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó.
Author photo credit: Jemimah James Wei
We are deeply grateful to acknowledge the initial readers for the PJI Prize: Li Yun Alvarado, Steven Cordova, Sarah Mangold, and Monica Sok.
Next year’s Poetic Justice Institute Prize Judge will be Meg Day.