Ugandan poet Jedidiah Mugarura’s debut collection, Nyamuteza, will be published in February 2027 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of the African Poetry Book Series, and preorders are now open. The 96-page book won the 2025 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, which comes with a $1,000 cash award and publication in the series. Mugarura was selected by a judging panel of Chris Abani, Gabeba Baderoon, Aracelis Girmay, John Keene, Matthew Shenoda, Mahtem Shiferraw, and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, with Kwame Dawes, director of the African Poetry Book Fund, also on the panel.

The title is the Runyankore word for the planet Pluto, and the book opens with a “Black dictionary” that defines four of the brightest objects in the Kuiper Belt. What follows is a book-length poem that works as a love song. It is set in a rural Ugandan village devastated by a hailstorm, a climate catastrophe that falls on people who are also responsible for feeding their community. Mugarura writes in an incantatory mode, with a novelist’s attention to story, likening the hail to stars and weaving Nkore ideology into Black thought in search of what the publisher calls “a language toward survivance.”

The early praise is strong. Chris Abani compares the collection to Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, while noting that it is also original. John Keene, himself a National Book Award winner for poetry, describes it as an incantatory text that melds a queer love song with a futuristic ecopoetic and political critique, and says it offers a new vision for twenty-first century Ugandan and African poetry. Donika Kelly, author of Bestiary, says the book “brindles with song” and proposes a cosmology that recognizes the autonomies of land, deep space, and the human between, calling Mugarura “a new and prescient voice.” Elizabeth Mudenyo, author of With Both Hands, says the book “gifts its people a wider canvas for dreaming,” and Aracelis Girmay, one of the Sillerman judges, says she was “quite astounded” by the work. In his foreword, Kwame Dawes calls Nyamuteza a work of great complexity and beauty that will keep rewarding close study in the years to come.

Mugarura (they/them) is a storyteller descended from the people of Nkore, and their work is about recovering the songs lost to colonial violence and imagining futures shaped by agency. They are a creative writing instructor at the University of Guelph, where they also earned their MFA, and a workshop facilitator for Write by the Water at Lakeshore Arts in Etobicoke, Ontario. Their poems have appeared in Brittle Paper, Humber Literary Review, Obsidian, and Ampersand Review, and their prose in Lolwe and Transition. Their play Tomorrow Never Came was staged by the National Queer Theater in New York in 2025.

Nyamuteza is the latest title in the African Poetry Book Series, which has also published Saddiq Dzukogi, Romeo Oriogun, Safia Elhillo, and Chisom Okafor. The Sillerman Prize is open each year to African poets who have not yet published a full-length collection, and the 2026 call for manuscripts runs from September 15 to December 1. Nyamuteza can be preordered now from the University of Nebraska Press.