Adedayo Agarau has won the 2024 C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, one of two annual contests sponsored by Poetry International that honors a single poem of any length. His prize-winning poem, “Halloween, Iowa,” was selected by judge Sandra Alcosser and will appear in a forthcoming issue of Poetry International.

Alcosser praised the poem’s distinctive voice, observing that it “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.”

The win adds to an already impressive year for Agarau, whose debut collection The Years of Blood won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers and will be published by Fordham University Press in Fall 2025. He is a 2025 Wallace Stegner Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and was a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist.

Beyond his creative work, Agarau serves as Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and as Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020).

The C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize carries a $1,000 cash award and publication in Poetry International. Past winners include Felicia Zamora, Heather Derr-Smith, and Rebecca Foust.

Congratulations to Adedayo Agarau on this well-deserved recognition!