BROOKLYN, NY – Cave Canem is pleased to announce that evolutionary biologist Dr. Brandon Kilbourne is the winner of the 2025 Cave Canem Prize. Natural History—which bears witness to how the study of the natural world has been intertwined with the horrors of slavery and colonialism—will be published by Graywolf Press in Fall 2025. In honor of the Prize’s 25th anniversary, Cave Canem and Graywolf Press are partnering to present a slate of international events and readings, with further details to be announced in the coming months.
Dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts by unpublished Black poets, the Cave Canem Prize launched in 1999 with Rita Dove’s selection of Domestic Work by Natasha Trethewey, who went on to serve as the US Poet Laureate and win the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. In a full circle moment, Trethewey served as this year’s judge. In her judge’s citation, Trethewey writes:
“Among the perspectives of explorers and scientists, visitors and guides of Natural History is that of the poet himself. A research biologist working at the Berlin Museum of Natural History, Dr. Kilbourne has examined the artifacts and plumbed their meanings. The result is a complex meditation on wonder and devastation of the natural world and an elegy for the earth by an observer who sees, clear-eyed, the ways it ‘premonishes disappearance.’ Aptly, the wonder of the poet is likened to a marvel universe wherein early trips to the Museum of Natural History kindled the desire for scientific knowledge long before the understanding of its dark underbelly.”
The collection begins by probing the history of the Transatlantic slave trade and the simultaneous excavation of specimens and natural materials from across Africa. In The Giraffe Titan (I), Kilbourne uses the dinosaur exhibition at his current place of work to compare “the horrors of the Jurassic” with the violence that engendered colonial expansion.
Imagine on an over-muggy Earth, a head
towering above in the domain of treetops
and dogfighting pterosaurs, imagine
the head-crowned neck crashing down
like a felled alder, the impact thundering
as if a deposed god was hurled to earth;
in final moments, would the aged Titan be able
to imagine scavengers biting into its cold skin,
its bones swallowed by tidal mud? Could
it then possibly imagine a world beyond its ken
hundreds of thousands of millennia later
in which twenty men in Berlin would carve
its continent into plantations, mines, and ivory
hunting grounds, their talons manifest in
massacres charring within burning villages,
famine’s gaunt ribs slowly quelling rebellions,
black skin in the mouths of ravenous empires?
“As someone whose formal training was in the sciences and not in creative writing, winning the Cave Canem Prize feels unbelievably special,” said Kilbourne. “However, what makes this an even more exceptional honor is to have Natural History selected for this prize by Natasha Trethewey, a poet whose skill in using poetry to explore and question history and the past has been recognized with a Pulitzer Prize and a term as US Poet Laureate. The selection of Natural History for the Cave Canem Prize also underscores the commonalities of awe, curiosity and observation that are present between poetry and science and the ability of these two disciplines to enhance one another.”
Originally from Louisiana, Kilbourne is currently a research biologist working at the Berlin Museum of Natural History and the 2024 Artist-in-Residence in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University, for which he investigated the parallels between science and poetry. He has given poetry readings at scientific conferences on entomology and paleontology and his work has appeared in Poet Lore, Obsidian, Ecotone, Tahoma Literary Review, Terrain.org, Artemis, West Trade Review, Split Rock Review, The Hopper, Jabberwock Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, The Fourth River, Decolonial Passage, Slant, Catamaran Literary Reader, Naugatuck River Review, Sky Island Journal, Panel Magazine, Sea to Sky Review, and Beach Reads.
“The year the Cave Canem Prize was conceived, I could count the number of books of poetry collections by Black poets, published by trade presses, on my two hands–and I am happy to say that Graywolf was one of those trade presses! Since that time the majority of our Prize winners have published multiple books and one could argue that we have seen the greatest flourishing of Black poets since the Harlem Renaissance. Dr. Kilbourne’s win, from an unusual path, signifies a quarter of a century nurturing Black poets and the power of poetry’s presence in all places,” said Dante Micheaux, Cave Canem’s Director of Programs.
ABOUT CAVE CANEM
Cave Canem is a nonprofit organization, committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets. Founded by artists for artists, Cave Canem fosters community across the diaspora to enrich the field by facilitating a nurturing space in which to learn, experiment, create and present. Cave Canem develops audiences for Black voices that have worked and are working in the craft of poetry.
ABOUT GRAYWOLF PRESS
Considered one of the nation’s leading nonprofit publishers, Graywolf Press publishes risk-taking, visionary writers who transform culture through literature. Recent books published by Graywolf have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, among other honors. Graywolf Press is celebrating fifty years of publishing in 2024. Visit graywolfpress.org for more information.