This article lists the winners and nominees for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. This award was first awarded in 2007 and since its conception, Nikki Giovanni holds the record for most wins in this category with three.
Winners and nominees
2000s +Award winners and finalists, 2007–2009 Year Book Author Result 2007 Celebrations, Rituals of Peace and Prayer Winner Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees Finalist Hoops Jazz We Speak Your Names 2008 Acolytes: PoemsWinner Duende: Poems Finalist Eloquence: Rhythm and Renaissance Quiver of Arrows Selected Poems 2009 colspan="3"
2010s +Award winners and finalists, 2010–2019 Year Book Author Result 2010 Bicycles Winner Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry Finalist Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem Mixology Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall 2011 100 Best African-American Poems Winner Hard Times Require Furious Dancing Finalist Holding Company Suck on the Marrow White Egrets 2012 Afro Clouds & Nappy Rain: The Curtis Brown Poems Winner Head Off & Split Finalist Honoring Genius: The Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice Intimate Thoughts Last Seen 2013 Speak Water Winner Hurrah's Nest Finalist Maybe the Saddest Thing Thrall 2014 Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers Winner Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid Finalist Hum Ai2015 Citizen: An American Lyric Winner Digest Finalist We Didn't Know Any Gangsters 2016 How to Be Drawn Winner Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude Finalist Reconnaissance Redbone Wild Hundreds 2017 Collected Poems: 1974–2004 Winner Counting Descent Finalist Thief in the Interior 2018 Incendiary Art: Poems Winner My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter Finalist Silencer Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems 2019 Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart Winner Confessions of a Barefaced Woman Finalist Ghost, Like a Place Refuse
2020s +Award winners and finalists, 2020–present Year Book Author Result 2020 Felon: Poems Winner A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland Finalist Honeyfish Mistress 2021 Winner Homie Finalist Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry Seeing the Body Un-American 2022Perfect Black WinnerPlaylist for the ApocalypseFinalistSuch Color: New and Selected Poems What Water Knows: Poems 2023To the Realization of Perfect HelplessnessWinnerBest Barbarian FinalistBluest Nude Concentrate Muse Found in a Colonized Body 2024suddenly weWinnerAbove GroundFinalistSo to SpeakWhy Fathers Cry at Night
Multiple wins and nominations Wins 3 wins Nikki Giovanni
Nominations
4 nominations Nikki Giovanni
3 nominations Derek Walcott
2 nominations Camille T. Dungy Major Jackson Jamaal May Carl Phillips
References