Cave Canem Foundation, Inc., North America’s premier “home for black poetry,” is pleased to announce that Iain Haley Pollock has received the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for his manuscript,
Spit Back a Boy, selected by Elizabeth Alexander. The University of Georgia Press will publish the collection in spring 2011. Additionally, Mr. Pollock will receive $1,000 and a feature reading. Pollock lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and teaches English at Chestnut Hill Academy. A Cave Canem fellow and an alumnus of the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review and Callaloo; poems are available online at
The Drunken Boat and
AGNI Online.
Established in 1999 with Rita Dove’s selection of Natasha Trethewey’s
Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), the Cave Canem Poetry Prize is an annual first-book award dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts by African American poets. Cave Canem itself is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.
The University of Georgia Press has published several prior winners of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize:
A GATHERING OF MATTER/A MATTER OF GATHERING by Dawn Lundy Martin(2006),
THE LISTENING by Kyle Dargan(2003), and
LEAVING SATURN by Major Jackson(2000).
