Research biologist based in Berlin receives $10,000 prize given to unpublished Black poets

NEW YORK — A biologist’s debut poetry collection that weaves science with a condemnation of slavery and colonialism has received a $10,000 literary award. The Cave Canem Prize helped launch the career of such acclaimed poets as Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith.

Dr. Brandon Kilbourne’s “Natural History” is this year’s winner of the Cave Canem award, given for work by an unpublished Black poet. The award was first presented, in 1999, to Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate who was the judge for Kilbourne’s prize.

“A research biologist working at the Berlin Museum of Natural History, Dr. Kilbourne has examined the artifacts and plumbed their meanings,” Trethewey’s citation reads in part. “The result is a complex meditation on wonder and devastation of the natural world and an elegy for the earth by an observer who sees, clear-eyed, the ways it ‘premonishes disappearance.’”

Kilbourne’s book will be published next fall by Graywolf Press, Cave Canem announced Tuesday. Cave Canem is a nonprofit center based in New York that helps develop and promote the works of Black poets.

“As someone whose formal training was in the sciences and not in creative writing, winning the Cave Canem Prize feels unbelievably special,” Kilbourne said in a statement. “However, what makes this an even more exceptional honor is to have Natural History selected for this prize by Natasha Trethewey.”