BROOKLYN, NY — Cave Canem Foundation, Inc., North America’s premier “home for Black Poetry,” is pleased to announce that Vievee Francis has received the 2010 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript, Horse in the Dark, selected by Parneshia Jones and Adrian Matejka. Northwestern University Press will publish the collection in March 2011. Combining the efforts of the two organizations to celebrate and publish works of lasting cultural value and literary excellence, the prize is a second‐book award for African American poets.

Adrian Matejka writes, “The poems in Vievee Francis’s Horse in the Dark are revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history. Her poems remind [us] that geography is fluid and camouflaged by our own memories, memories that are often anthropomorphized by the mechanisms of race and place. And when the poems lean sideways to whisper something necessary, or rise up to tell another kind of truth, history is distilled like moonshine, each moment perfect and dangerous.”

Vievee Francis is the author of Blue‐Tail Fly, a collection of poems published by Wayne State University Press in 2006. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, anthologies and textbooks, including Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Approaching Literature: Reading Writing and Thinking, Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was the 2009/2010 Poet in Residence for the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program. She is the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Award, a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship, and Callaloo and Cave Canem fellowships.