Nigerian poet, Adedayo Agarau has been announced as a 2024 winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC Writer for his book, The Years of Blood (Selected by Elisabeth Frost and JoAnne McFarland). He wins alongside Poetic Justice Institute Prize Winner, Marcella Durand, for A Winter Triangle (Selected by Srikanth Reddy).
Winners receive $1,000, and their winning volumes will be published by Fordham University Press in Fall 2025.
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.
Thinking of poetry’s ancient and modern links to music, dance, and other performing arts, Professor Frank Boyle and a small group of faculty, students, and alumni, with the particular help of Dean Cira Vernazza, sought to make a place for poetry at New York’s Center for the Performing Arts by founding Poets Out Loud in 1992 at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus.
With a mission of providing opportunities for the creation, dissemination, and enjoyment of poetry, Poets Out Loud grew from an unfunded, all-volunteer community into a national organization with a full calendar of annual events, including: a reading series each semester, an annual book series (the POL Prizes) in partnership with Fordham University Press, and high school outreach programs.
Congratulations to both Adedayo and Marcella on the remarkable achievement!
Click here to read more on the Prize.
Bongiwe T. Maphosa
Bongiwe Maphosa is a budding author with a passion for storytelling. With her thought-provoking narratives, she takes her readers on a literary adventure. Bongiwe's works on the human condition from a fresh perspective have earned her recognition and publications in the Avbob Poetry Anthology of 2019, The Writer's Club of South Africa 2021, and JAY Lit in 2021. She hopes to cement her place in the literary community.
