Detroit Poet Wins Cave Canem Book Award

The second annual Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize winner has been announced.

Detroit-based poet and Cave Canem fellowship recipient Vievee Francis received the award for her second poetry collection, Horse in the Dark, selected by Parneshia Jones and Adrian Matejka.

Francis, a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation prize winner and graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, is also the author of the collection Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne
State University Press, 2006). Horse in the Dark will be published by Northwestern University Press in March 2011.

The prize, established in 2008, is given for a second poetry collection by an African American writer. The inaugural winner was Indigo Moor for Through the Stonecutter's Window.

To hear a selection of recordings of Francis reading her poems, as well as her words on a humanitarian poetry project, the pleasure of writing, and poets she recommends reading, visit her archive page at From the Fishhouse.