Alumni News, Awards and Honors

Sinclair ’10 Named Finalist for OCM Bocas Prize

For her recently published poetry collection, Cannibal, Safiya Sinclair ’10 has been longlisted for the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Safiya Sinclair

The $10,000 prize, sponsored by One Caribbean Media, recognizes books in three genre categories—poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction—published by Caribbean authors in 2016.

“Sinclair’s Cannibal is haunted by the character of Caliban from The Tempest, as it explores Jamaican childhood and womanhood, and otherness in a strange place that may be the United States where the poet now lives, or language itself,” the judging panel said.

Cannibal was named winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and named one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year.”

Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her literary honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Sinclair's poems have appeared in PoetryKenyon ReviewGrantaThe Nation and elsewhere. After graduating from Bennington, She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia. Sinclair is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

The OCM Bocas Prize winners each genre category will be announced on March 27, with the overall winner to be named April 29 during the seventh annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain.