Ghanaian-American poet Afia Ansong has won the 2026 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, one of the most closely watched awards for debut poetry from the continent, for a collection titled I buried [her] in a field of lemongrass.
The prize, worth $1,000, comes with publication of the winning manuscript by the University of Nebraska Press as part of the African Poetry Book Series, a route to print that has launched the careers of several poets now considered central figures in contemporary African writing. Kwame Dawes, director of the African Poetry Book Fund and series editor, sat on the judging panel alongside Chris Abani, Gabeba Baderoon, John Keene, Matthew Shenoda, Mahtem Shiferraw and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers.
Judge Mahtem Shiferraw said she was drawn to the collection “for what it can do, the possibilities it can open with each poem, which go beyond the page,” a comment that pointed to the judging panel’s interest in formal ambition as much as subject matter. The prize drew three finalists, all from Nigeria: Wale Ayinla for A Brief History of Seeds, Abduljalal Musa Aliyu for Cataclysm, and Chimezie Umeoka for Eschatologies, a shortlist that judges and organisers noted ranged widely in style and theme.
From workshops to the page
Ansong is the founder of The Adinkra Projects, an initiative that runs poetry workshops supporting emerging Ghanaian writers, work that sits alongside her academic post as an assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Rhode Island. She has previously published three chapbooks, Black Ballad, Try Kissing God and American Mercy, and her poems have appeared in journals including The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner and Four Way Review.
The Sillerman Prize has become one of the more reliable routes for African poets to reach a wider international readership. Winners receive a cash award alongside sustained institutional backing from the African Poetry Book Fund’s publishing and promotional network, support that matters most for writers working outside the continent’s major cities or without ties to established literary institutions. That network can offer distribution and critical attention a self-published or small-press debut would struggle to reach on its own, and it has built a track record of keeping winning poets in print and in circulation well beyond the year their prize was announced.
A wider African literary moment
The win adds to a year of attention for African poetry and fiction on the international stage, with prizes across the continent and its diaspora continuing to draw scrutiny over who gets published, who judges, and which stories reach international readers first. Many of those debates centre less on whether strong manuscripts exist and more on whether presses with international reach are willing to take them on, a question the Sillerman Prize’s publishing guarantee answers directly for at least one poet each year.
For Ansong, whose work has moved between workshop spaces built to support younger Ghanaian writers and journals read far from Accra, the prize also validates a career built partly through teaching and mentorship rather than through residencies or MFA programmes alone. The University of Nebraska Press’s publication schedule for the collection has not yet been announced, but the African Poetry Book Series has typically brought winning manuscripts to print within roughly a year of the award being announced, giving readers a reasonably clear window for when I buried [her] in a field of lemongrass will reach bookshops. The recognition arrives the same week that a very different project in Zimbabwe is pursuing a similar goal by other means: a Matobo heritage initiative is filming elders to document indigenous dishes before the knowledge behind them disappears, another effort to put African cultural memory on the record before it is lost.
