Nigerian poet Adedayo Agarau has been named the winner of the 2024 C.P. Cavafy Prize for his poem Halloween, Iowa.
The piece was selected by judge Sandra Alcosser and will appear in a forthcoming issue of Poetry International.
Sandra Alcosser noted:
“Adedayo Agarau’s Halloween, Iowa moves with urban grace through interior America, capturing with small precise details the vulnerability of a speaker who negotiates between the cosmologies of an exterior as well as an interior world.”
Adedayo Agarau is the author of The Years of Blood, his debut collection and winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers, to be published by Fordham University Press in Fall 2025. He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ’25, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and as Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. His earlier works include the chapbooks Origin of Name (2020) and The Arrival of Rain (2020).
The finalists for the 2024 prize are Aiden Heung, Bruce Bond, Joyce Schmid, Cory Brown, Brianna Steidle, Weijia Pan, Catherine Carter, Joanie Puma, Jordan Hill, Michael Loderstedt, Bridget O’Bernstein, Jaye Kranz, Michael Meyerhofer, Jamila Osman, Howard Williams, Ellie Laabs, George Kramer, Madalyn Hochendoner, Mischa Kuczynski, and Andrew Garvin.
Congratulations, Adedayo Agarau!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
