Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

Out-Spoken Press is excited to be partnering with Noemi Press in the USA to extend the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize to writers of Arab heritage based in the UK.

The Etel Adnan Poetry Prize will open 1 September 2025. Noemi Press will accept submissions for the Etel Adnan Poetry Series and award the $2,000 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize to a first or second book of poetry, in English, by a writer of Arab heritage. The winning manuscript will be published in North America by Noemi Press, and in the UK by Out-Spoken Press.

The prize is open each September. The 2025 Guest Judge will be Farid Matuk.

Since its inception in 2015 the series has sought to celebrate and foster the writings and writers that make up the vibrant and diverse Arab American community and will for the first time be extended to writers of Arab heritage in the UK. Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah serve as editors and founders of the series. The prize is named in honor of the world-renowned poet, novelist, essayist, and artist Etel Adnan.

In 2025, the Etel Adnan Prize moved to Noemi Press. Given Noemi’s mission of creating daring poetry that counters the status quo and nurtures voices from marginalised communities, this collaboration is one of communal strength and passion.

History of the Prize

Though poets of Arab heritage have been writing in English for more than a century, little attention had been paid to these poets as a community. In 2008 the publication of Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry edited by Hayan Charara and published by the University of Arkansas Press, brought attention to the diversities and talents of this already established but growing group of poets.

Since the anthology’s publication in 2008, many more new poets of Arab heritage have emerged, and their work continues to challenge and reinvent not only the aesthetics they have inherited but also the very notions of what it means to be Arab or Arab American. Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah, themselves celebrated poets, felt the time was ripe for a series that simultaneously valued the larger community to which these new poets belonged, as well as their engagement with new and innovative poetics. From 2015 to 2024, the prize was published through the University of Arkansas Press.

With the move to Noemi Press in 2025, to extend the prize to Anglophone writers of Arab heritage outside the US and amplify the prize winners across readerships, Out-Spoken Press is pleased to partner with the Prize to offer publication and distribution of the winning books in the UK.

Find out more about the Etel Adnan Prize, its founders and judges, and how to submit here: