4 Books Published by Autumn House Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Murmur, the second poetry collection by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, explores the complexity of race and the body of a Black man in contemporary America.

Barnett’s sophomore collection considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina.

A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”

Three judges, selected by the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, were unanimous in their decision to award the $10,000 prize to Wesley for her 2020 collection Praise Song for My Children: New and Collected Poems.

Praise Song for My Children celebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, and friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility. These poems lend an international voice to the tales of motherhood, as Wesley speaks both to the African and to the Western experience of motherhood, particularly black motherhood. She pulls from African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to enrich her striking emotional range. Leading us to the depths of mourning and the heights of tender love, she responds to American police brutality, writing “To be a black woman is to be a woman, / ready to mourn,” and remembers a dear friend who is at once “mother and wife and friend and pillar / and warrior woman all in one.”

Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love, seeing with eyes that have witnessed both national and personal tragedy and redemption. Born in Tugbakeh, Liberia and raised in Monrovia, Wesley immigrated to the United States in 1991 to escape the Liberian civil war. In this moving collection, she invites us to join her as she buries loved ones, explores long-distance connections through social media, and sings bittersweet praises of the women around her, of mothers, and of Africa.

Winner of the inaugural Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize, Cameron Barnett’s debut The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water explores the complexity of race and the body for a Black man in today’s America.

In Wesley’s fourth poetry collection, she continues her lyric exploration of what it means to be a survivor and an immigrant, retelling stories of a generation ruined by war and grief, and the healing that follows.