The poems in under the aegis of a winged mind are inspired by the life and times of the jazz composer and pianist Earl “Bud” Powell. Powell was a leading figure in the development of jazz, but throughout his life, he also faced struggles with police brutality, harassment, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental illness. In this collection, makalani bandele explores Powell’s life through a blend of both formal and free verse persona poems. These poems are multivocal, with the speaker often embodying Powell himself and sometimes a close friend or family member, the spectator of a performance, or a fellow musician.

While the book follows the narrative of Powell’s life, the poems are experimental in form and presentation. Playing with, reinventing, and restructuring poetic form, bandele draws on blues and jazz music theory to serve as a basis for much of the work’s construction. He uses language to recreate the experience of music itself, and his poetry includes a multitude of references and allusion to music lyrics and other poems. As the book recounts Powell’s life, it also explores how Black genius has encountered, struggled against, and developed mechanisms to cope with White supremacy in the United States. under the aegis of a winged mind won the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize.
 

A poetry collection that explores the complexity of race and the body for a Black man in contemporary America.
 
The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”
 

Poems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling.
 
In this stunning debut, John Belk 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. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs.
 
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 Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press’s Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
 

Poems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling.
 
In this stunning debut, John Belk 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. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs.
 
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 Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press’s Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
 

Poems reflecting on contemporary political issues, mythological origins, and the capacity for hope in the face of uncertain futures.  
 
This collection weaves together themes of motherhood, immigration, social transformation, and interrogation. Throughout Seed Celestial, Sara R. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers—as she looks to an uncertain future.
 
Bringing together contemporary issues of climate change, gun violence, and feminism while working from her own experience of raising a young daughter, she writes, “You were inside my body / while I was outside; / outside was everything else.” Burnett vividly renders her own origin story as an immigrant’s daughter using the myths of Demeter and Persephone. This book is a love letter to the earth the way only a mother can write it: appreciating all its faults while seeing its beauty. Burnett offers a poetry collection that is tender, and honest, akin to having an intimate conversation with a friend who tells us what we know to be true about ourselves, our twin capacities for love and violence, and what we don’t. She intertwines our violent, complicated world with the uncanny human capacity for hope and describes the awe of a world recreating itself again and again while wondering about all we lose and leave behind, especially for the next generation.
 
Seed Celestial is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Eileen Myles.