Awuor Ouma’s debut manuscript Blue Hands, Brown Skin has been named the 2026 Cave Canem Prize winner. Written in the aftermath of her father’s death, the collection moves through grief, migration, and the experience of carrying a self across languages and borders. It will be published by the University of Georgia Press in Fall 2026.

“Winning this prize feels like being welcomed into a lineage, a community that has carried and expanded the possibilities of Black poetry,” said Ouma. “It’s both affirmation and inheritance, reminding me that language can still be a form of refuge, resistance, and rebirth. It also feels deeply personal and a quiet confirmation that the years of writing in obscurity, of doubting and beginning again, were not in vain. It is both a homecoming and a beginning.”

The Cave Canem Prize, which has been running since 1999, exists specifically to get first books by Black poets of the African diaspora into print and into hands. It has a track record that speaks for itself: its inaugural winner, Natasha Trethewey, went on to become US Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner. The list of past recipients includes Ajibola Tolase, Aurielle Marie, Julian Randall, and Rickey Laurentiis, poets who have each gone on to shape what American and diasporic poetry sounds like right now. The prize carries a $10,000 cash award alongside publication and a featured reading.

Ouma is a Kenyan writer living in Berlin, a global healthcare consultant by profession, and a poet who has spent years writing, as she herself has put it, in obscurity. Her work has appeared in Doek! and The Kalahari Review. Blue Hands, Brown Skin sits at the intersection of mourning, migration, and the impossible task of carrying a self across languages and borders. The judge, Cave Canem fellow and Emory University professor D.S. Marriott, described the collection as wrestling with how translation can make a poem an exile from itself, how grief, experienced in a foreign tongue, risks going unnamed and therefore unprocessed.

Submissions for the 2027 Prize are now open. Submissions opened April 1st and close April 30th. The prize is open to unpublished Black poets of the African diaspora without a full-length collection from a professional press, chapbooks and self-published work under 500 copies do not disqualify you. The winner receives $10,000, publication through Graywolf Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, or University of Georgia Press, 15 copies of the book, and a featured reading with the judge.

Submit at cavecanempoets.org before April 30th.