“Natural History” by Brandon Kilbourne, Graywolf Press, 96 pages.

Since 1999, the Cave Canem Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets, has awarded an annual prize to a debut poetry collection. This year’s Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner is Brandon Kilbourne, a Louisiana-born evolutionary biologist living in Berlin, whose “Natural History” is a brilliant and beguiling set of poems released by the top-tier independent publisher Graywolf Press.

Born in Houma and raised in Lafayette, Kilbourne studied biological engineering at LSU and earned his doctorate in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago. In 2014, he moved to Berlin as a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and later worked at the Museum für Naturkund

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