I said big news was coming, and here it is: I’m so grateful to Cave Canem and to Douglas Kearney for selecting Gumbo Ya Ya as the 2020 Poetry Prize winner! It means so much to me that these poems are seen as worthy of such an honor.

AH! I’M FINNA HAVE A BOOK, Y’ALL! WHAT?!? https://twitter.com/cavecanempoets/status/1303370211630997506

I wrote Gumbo Ya Ya for Black folks, for Black femmes, for Black gxrls. I wrote Gumbo Ya Ya while combatting State/police violence in the Deep South. I wrote Gumbo Ya Ya for my egun, for my niggas and for me.

I can not tell you how this feels.

For those who don't know, GYY was set to be published in 2017. I was so excited to introduce this work into our world.

But, as we know, literary institutions can be wildly racist and anti-Black. I was being combatted by folks who said they were my support system. It was HARD.

I did everything I could: I sought out advice from folks I trusted, I read "publishing for dummies" a thousand times, I even planned + facilitated a two-hour-long teach-in on my intentions behind poetics/rhetoric w/my former publishers, to try + alleviate the issues we had.

It didn't work. May of 2019, just four months before GYY was supposed to be in the world, my publisher and I voided the contract. I made this decision thinking that this manuscript would be left on a shelf.

I didn't believe Gumbo Ya Ya would be published.

I'm only sharing because my BRILLIANT community kept me grounded and affirmed and uplifted and centered on what was most important to me: trying to live out the audacity I write about.

Black poets are told we aren't enough. We are told we must quiet our magic(s) to be palatable.

Some of us are writing and some of us are marching and some of us are deepening a pleasure practice and some of us are breathing and some of us are sitting in quiet and some of us are dancing and some us try to hold ourselves together. All of this is audacious + worthy of praise.

So while I turn up for me and my egun and my lil book today, I am really in awe of what audaciousness has done. We can embody the politics we read about, and still reach our goals/dreams. It is possible. Wow.

Not possible, though, w/ community.

So grateful to @NaniBratch, @Danez_Smif, @nabilas_here, @CAMONGHNE, @NifMuhammad, @pagesofle, @JulianThePoet, @pleasureisblack, @kendracanyou for keeping it real, showing up w/ resources, encouraging, dragging me (lol), or offering support.

Also grateful to @sophias13 @DaShaunLH, @ColonizedLocal, Hunter, @imanixdavis, @MsPackyetti, and @RachelMcKibbens for counsel last year, advice this year, wine/cocktail sessions, listening to me complain and helping me deepen my own political praxis as a writer and organizer.

I know this thread may seem dramatic for folks who don't know what went down last year. LOLLLL.

Imma be embarrassed about it TOMORROW, I'm sorry!
I'm toe-tapping on the devil's grave TODAY chile!