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.
Out-Spoken Press and Noemi Press are pleased to announce sour river by Antony Fangary as the winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize for poets of Arab heritage, winning US$2000, US publication with Noemi Press and UK publication with Out-Spoken Press.
Noemi Press, in partnership with Etel Adnan Poetry Prize co-editors and co-founders Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, is pleased to announce that sour river by Antony Fangary has been chosen as the winner of the 2025 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. In addition to a $2,000 prize and publication with Noemi Press, sour river will also be published under Out-Spoken Press in the United Kingdom in an effort to further amplify the work of the prize winner across readerships.
Antony Baher Fangary is a writer, satirist, and visual artist from California. He is Co-Director of Litquake’s Elder Writing Project, Translation and Poetry Editor at Denver Quarterly, and an editor of 20.35Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Vol. IX (2026). He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2023, and his poems, essays, and articles have appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Eater, Collateral, New American Writing, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Denver and holds an MFA from San Francisco State University.
On winning the Etel Adnan Prize, Antony says,
“Winning the Etel Adnan Prize still feels surreal; I couldn’t believe it at first, and I reread the email…at least ten times. I love Etel's work, and spent a great deal of time biking up and down Mount Tamalpais, knowing Etel loved it there. I still listen to Etel Adnan’s interviews and revisit her writing and paintings often, so winning a prize named after her feels like something beyond language.
Even more surreal is that I will be able to work with Farid Matuk, Fady Joudah, and Hayan Charara on my book; three poets who have deeply influenced me. I feel that every part of this prize is a gift, as I really admire the poets that Noemi Press and Out-Spoken Press publish, and having a book with either would be a dream come true; but having a book with both of them is unimaginable. I suppose I am struggling to find the words because I never thought something like this would happen; all I know is I can't wait to ride my bike through Mount Tamalpais again.”
Farid Matuk, judge of the 2025 prize, says of sour river,
“There is a terrible impulse among U.S. poets to offer in our poems the critique that will ransom our language. There is an equally terrible impulse to pretend that we don't have to. I’d hoped for but never found a secret third thing, until I read sour river.”
The Etel Adnan Poetry Prize celebrates the legacy of Etel Adnan by publishing a first or second book by a writer of Arab heritage. Since 2015, the series has sought to celebrate and foster the writings and writers that make up the vibrant and diverse Arab community. This is the first winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize since the partnership with Noemi Press and Out-Spoken Press began in 2025. The 2026 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize will open in September 2026.
About the Etel Adnan Poetry 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.