Nigerian poet Ameen Animashaun and Ghanaian poet Edinam Denoo have been named the winners of the inaugural Alhaji Arole Agarawu African Poetry Prize, an international award celebrating Black poets and the depth of Black lyricism across the African continent and its global diaspora. The winners were chosen from 356 submissions from 21 countries, and each takes home $1,000.

Animashaun wins the overall Alhaji Arole Agarawu African Poetry Prize for “Dog Fighting a Heron.” The prize is open to Black poets worldwide and was selected by guest judge Matthew Shenoda, a professor at Brown University and founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund. Denoo wins the Arole Grayling Wraith Prize, which is reserved for a poet living on the African continent, for “Bonu Bonu Kpoo.” Along with the $1,000, media partner Grayling and Wraith will produce a production-grade cinematic poetry adaptation of a selected work from “Bonu Bonu Kpoo,” in collaboration with the author.

Shenoda praised Animashaun’s suite for its keen lyrical eye. In his citation, he writes that Animashaun collapses those spaces into a world that gives us “a greater sense of relation to the contemporary and historical ruptures we experience.” The poems, Shenoda says, move the reader through a kind of syntactical arch that has the ability to bend our sense of time, and they are “beautiful poems that make us look beyond our moment and open up to a different future.”

For Animashaun, this is the latest in a string of major recognitions. In 2025, he won the Evaristo Prize for African Poetry, and $1,500, for his poem sequence “Song,” chosen from a shortlist of five. His full-length manuscript has been a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize, and his chapbook Calling a Spade was a finalist for the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize, both in 2024. His poems and essays have appeared in Poets.org, Rattle, Salamander, Lolwe, and Foglifter, among other places, and his writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Denoo is a Ghanaian poet and writer whose work explores the body, the politics of language, spirituality, and faith at the intersection of living. She is a 2025 Black Atlantic Residency Fellow and an alumna of both the 2025 Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS) Creative Writing Workshop for Emerging Writers and the 2025 Caine Prize Online Editing Workshop. She was second runner-up in 2024 and first runner-up in 2025 for the Adinkra Poetry Prize, and she is a recipient of the 2025 DUAPA Mentorship Program. Reflecting on the win, she called it “a profound and humbling milestone,” adding, “I hope these poems carry a fracture of the rhythm, form and truth Alhaji Arole Agarawu gave his craft.” She also thanked the board of trustees, Shenoda, and the foundation “for this honor and holding this space for the Black lyric.”

Two poets received honorable mentions: Rafiat Lamidi (Nigeria) for “The Lord of Loneliness” and Sydney Mayes (United States) for “By The Sweat of The Mountain’s Brow.”

The prize was established in memory of Alhaji Arole Agarawu (1930s–1995), a prolific West African songwriter and musician whose innovations in Yoruba musical forms went uncredited in formal institutions. It exists to provide formal acclaim and financial support for Black poets who are expanding the horizons of language and craft. The Arole Agarawu Foundation was set up by poet Adedayo Agarau, who named the prize for his grandfather, and its advisory board also includes author and former Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin.

The full suites by both winners can be read on the Arole Agarawu Foundation’s website at aroleagarawufoundation.com/about-prize/winners.

Congratulations to Ameen and Edinam!