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speculation, n. by Shayla Lawz won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and imagines a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death.

Shayla Lawz’s debut collection brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. 

The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real—a refracted past and present—through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities.

Taking to Water, the debut poetry collection by Jennifer Conlon, selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize, questions gender and embraces queerness through the lens of the natural world of North Carolina.

A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon’s poetry collection of gender questioning, is concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable. 

In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety—wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves.

Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection explores a son’s relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States.

Nebeolisa's poems highlight how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical, and at times, emotional, distance between them. He wonders: “I don’t understand / her smile or why she would be submerged / in pain and wouldn’t want to admit it. / Who did this to our mothers?” The book questions his Nigerian mother’s need to act brave and a son’s need to protect.

Terminal Maladies reminds us that grief is inevitable, yet unique to each of us, and serves as a tribute to Nebeolisa’s mother and is a necessary read for anyone who has faced the challenges of caring for a loved one.

The Animal Indoors, winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Terrance Hayes, traces the experience of a Black queer woman as she seeks refuge from an unsafe world.

Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded of how many lives one woman can live.

The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the stunning debut by John Belk and winner of the Autumn Houe Press Rising Writer Prize, looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. 

Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. 

Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus "Buff" Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us.

The Running Body by Emily Pifer, selected by Steve Almond as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, is a memoir of addiction, body image, and healing, through the lens of a long-distance runner.

 Pifer’s debut memoir wrestles and reckons with power and agency, language and story, body dysphoria and beauty standards, desire and addiction, loss and healing. Pifer employs multiple modes of storytelling—memoir, meditation, and cultural analysis—interweaving research, argument, and experience as she describes how, during her time as a collegiate distance runner, she began to run more while eating less. Many around her, including her coaches, praised her for these practices. But as she became faster, and as her body began to resemble the bodies that she had seen across start-lines and on the covers of running magazines, her bones began to fracture. 

The Running Body interrogates the stories we tell ourselves and the faultiness of memory. Fractures, figurative and literal, run through the narrative as Pifer explores the ways bodies become entangled in stories.

The Worried Well, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is a tragicomic collection that explores the intersection of anxiety and safety in a chaotic world.

Anthony Immergluck balances the thin lines between healing and ailing, between humor and tragedy throughout this exceptional debut poetry collection. Reveling at precipices of imminent disaster while grieving at thresholds of relief, The Worried Well asks, how do we live loving and full lives while being confronted with our mortality? How does language carry us between liminal spaces?

The “worried well” is a term often used pejoratively by medical professionals to describe a group of patients who may be lacking visible symptoms but opt for testing and preventative interventions, who seek treatments for ailments that don’t manifest readily in medical diagnostics. Immergluck unpacks the term by writing in the spaces where worry and wellness meet.

Despite the profound subjects explored, the collection carries us with a keen sense of humor, grounds us in the everyday, and rises to meet us with unexpected ruptures or sutures of language on each page. Summoning the restless dybbuk of Jewish mythology as well as David and Goliath, navigating hospital rooms, and surviving economic precarity, Immergluck creates a voice that is utterly new and needed in the literary landscape, a voice that reflects, “I don’t / know why I told a worry / child not to worry when / surely the trick is to give / the worry a name and then / to call it again and again.”

Natalie Homer's debut poetry collection explores the wilderness in all of us to find rest and divine providence.

In the story of the prophet Elijah, he must flee his home, and, after an arduous journey, he arrives under a broom tree, where he prays for his own death. But in his sleep, he is touched by an angel who provides food and water. In this moment, the broom tree becomes a symbol of shelter in a barren landscape, a portent of hope and renewal. Drawing inspiration from this tale, Natalie Homer’s Under the Broom Tree is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world. 

Exploring the idea of divine providence, Homer finds seams of light opening between forlorn moments and locates, 'Something to run a finger through, / something to shine in the ocher light.' Within these narrow spaces, Homer explores themes of longing, home, family, and self-worth amidst the wondrous backdrop of the American West and the Rust Belt, while integrating a rich mythology of narrative, image, and association. The broom tree, offering the capacity for shade and respite, becomes a source of connection and an inspiration for the collection. It is an invitation to sink deep into the earth and self and feel the roots entwine.