Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is excited to announce that Night Angler by Geffrey Davis is a nominee for the 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award honors the best in Black literature in the United States and around the globe.
Night Angler, Geffrey Davis’s James Laughlin Award-winning second collection of poems, reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for Black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the 1980s crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood.
Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. His honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published in Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and The Rainier Writing Workshop low-res MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. He also serves as the poetry editor of Iron Horse Literary Review. For more information about Geffrey Davis, visit geffreydavis.com.
Introduced in 2001, the Legacy Award was the first national award presented to Black writers by a national organization of Black writers. Fiction, nonfiction and poetry honorees are selected in a juried competition conducted by previous Legacy Award honorees. Merit awards are given at the discretion of the Board of Directors. Each October, the award winners are celebrated during a gala that draws an enthusiastic crowd of literary stars, readers, and representatives of the publishing industry, the arts, media, politics, and academia.
All nominees in debut novel, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry will be honored—and the winners and finalists will be announced—during the 19th Annual Legacy Awards Ceremony happening virtually on Friday, October 16th. In addition to the Legacy Award announcements that evening, 2020 career achievement awards will be presented to author Chimamanda Adichie and the Calabash Literary Festival founders, Kwame Dawes and Justine Henzell. For more information about this year's ceremony, visit hurstonwright.org.
Congratulations, Geffrey!
