I Could Never Be Your Woman by Meredith Nnoka is the winner of the eigth annual Toi Derricotte + Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.

Created through a partnership between Cave Canem, The Writer's Room at
the Betsy Hotel, and O, Miami Poetry Festival, the prize honors one outstanding chapbook manuscript per year by a Black poet, regardless of the poet’s publication history or career status.

The manuscript was selected by Herman Beavers.

Meredith Nnoka is a Chicago-based writer, educator, and prison abolitionist.

She has a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin Madison, both in Africana studies. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at a prison outside of Chicago and serves as program lead for Illinois's annual Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards.

Meredith's first chapbook, A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music, is available from C&R Press.

Publication of this chapbook was made possible through support from the
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Miami-Dade County, and Schmidt
Family Foundation.