Out Of Africa: Nigerian Poet Gbenga Adesina Wins 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA) have announced the list of winners for its 2026 edition … Nigerian poet Gbenga Adesina has emerged champion of the Poetry category for his debut collection Death Does Not End at the Sea. Selected by a distinguished jury chaired by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey, this year’s winners reflect both the […]
Black News 
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA) have announced the list of winners for its 2026 edition …
Nigerian poet Gbenga Adesina has emerged champion of the Poetry category for his debut collection Death Does Not End at the Sea.
Selected by a distinguished jury chaired by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey, this year’s winners reflect both the emergence of bold new literary voices and the prize’s growing prominence in the United States, underscored by a recent historic increase in award money that places AWBA among the country’s most significant literary honours.
“It is never easy to choose a single work in each genre from so many excellent books published each year,” said jury chair Natasha Trethewey. “That each of this year’s winners is a debut makes the honour all the more profound—new voices, already essential. These books matter because they deepen our understanding, enlarge our empathy, and remind us of literature’s power to illuminate who we are.”
Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He received his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. His work has been published in the Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. Adesina’s debut collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea, was the Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Commenting on the book, the AWBA jury noted, “At the heart of Gbenga Adesina’s haunting, elegiac collection is the stunning titular poem, ‘Death Does Not End at the Sea,’ a meditation on the difficult journeys—both spiritual and physical—undertaken by migrants, people fleeing troubled lands, with the hope of new lives.”
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognise books that have made important contributions to the understanding of racism and an appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures. Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book awards in 1935, in honour of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for social justice. Today, it remains the only American book prize focused on works that address racism and diversity.
Past winners have presented the extraordinary art and culture of peoples around the world, explored human-rights violations, exposed the effects of racism on children, reflected on growing up biracial, and illuminated the dignity of people as they search for justice.
