Okwudili Nebeolisa Wins 2023 CAAPP Book Prize

May 9, 2023

AHP is pleased to announce that Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies was selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize! Of the collection, Nicole said,

“Because the growl of thunder was distant,” the speaker notes in Terminal Maladies, “I completely ignored it.” The mere mention of the far-off rumbling, however, means otherwise. This thunderous collection considers the space between attention and abstraction, between life and death. Which is another way to say love.

Okwudili’s debut book will be published by Autumn House Press in 2024.


Okwudili Nebeolisa is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggetts Prize for Fiction. For his poetry, he has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Granum Foundation. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Image, Salamander Magazine, The Sewanee Review, Strange Horizons, The Threepenny Review, and are forthcoming in Transition and Cutleaf, while his nonfiction has appeared in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He will begin an MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota this fall.


To read the full press on this year’s prize, including the finalist, please visit CAAPP’s website here.

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