Blue Hands, Brown Skin: 2026 Cave Canem Prize Reading - New York City

Join Cave Canem in celebrating the 2026 Cave Canem Prize Winner, Awuor Ouma, with a reading in New York City! Join Cave Canem in celebrating the 2026 winner of the Cave Canem Prize, Awuor Ouma, with an intimate reading in New York City featuring Ouma and Kwame Dawes. Her work, Blue Hands, Brown Skin, is a vulnerable exposition written in the wake of her father’s death. Ouma traverses motifs of identity, memory, and states of exile. Her works explore a constant cycle of shedding and rebirth. “Awuor Ouma’s Blue Hands, Brown Skin opens in the immediate aftermath of the death of the poet’s father, and the need to learn to breathe again in exile and in mourning; and the poems go on to enact the very visceral difficulty of such learning for a self ‘when every scar’ evokes a memory of ‘a language I hadn’t learned yet,’ and the homeland is now ‘the wrong accent’ requiring documentation of ‘things we don’t translate.’ — D.S. Marriott About Blue Hands, Brown Skin A lyrical exploration of migration, grief, and the resilience of African womanhood Blue Hands, Brown Skin is a powerful debut poetry collection about belonging, loss, migration, and the quiet resilience of women who carry entire homelands in their bodies. Moving between Kenya and Berlin, these poems explore how migration reshapes a life and what it means to grieve far from home, to navigate love and language across borders, and to return to oneself after being broken open by the world. Through storytelling and intimate lyricism, the poet examines how the body remembers what history tries to erase—from girlhood rituals and ancestral wisdom to the bureaucratic coldness of immigration lines and the loneliness of diaspora. Each poem becomes an altar to survival, a place where memory, motherhood, and identity meet. What makes this collection distinctive is its fusion of personal narrative with cultural myth, its fearless attention to the spiritual and emotional worlds of African women, and its insistence that softness, even in exile, is a form of strength. Blue Hands, Brown Skin is a testament to how we carry home within us, in our grief, in our names, and in the stories that refuse to be burned.