PEN America has recently announced the winners of their 2025 Literary Awards. The prizes recognize translators and writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and more who have published dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence. Of this year’s 13 PEN Literary Award winners, three are Black professors at universities in the United States.
Frank X Walker, professor of English at the University of Kentucky, received the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection for Load in Nine Times (Liverlight, 2024). The book features poems that imagine the voices of African Americans born into slavery who suddenly found themselves enlisted as the first colored troops to fight for the Union Army.
A University of Kentucky faculty member for two decades, Professor Walker is the first African American writer to be named poet laureate for the state of Kentucky. He is known for coining the term “Affrilachia,” which refers to the cultural contributions of African Americans who live in the Appalachian Mountains stretching from New York to Mississippi. Throughout his career, Professor Walker has authored 13 poetry collections, including Affrilachia: Poems by Frank X Walker (Ohio University Press, 2020).
Professor Walker received his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Kentucky and his master of fine arts degree from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.
Kali Nicole Gross, the National Endowment for Humanities Professor and chair of African American studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, received the 2025 PEN Open Book Award. This award recognizes an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color. Professor Gross was honored for her book, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times (Seal Press, 2024).
In addition to her role at Emory, Dr. Gross is a distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians. An interdisciplinary scholar, she studies Black women’s historical experiences in the U.S. criminal justice system, currently focusing on the experiences of Black women and capital punishment. She has authored several books, including A Black Women’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020).
Dr. Gross holds a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania.
Charles Henry Rowell, professor of English at Texas A&M University, received the 2025 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in honor of his career-long contributions as managing editor of Callaloo, an academic journal dedicated to Black writers, artists, and scholars across the African diaspora.
Dr. Rowell founded Callaloo in 1976 at Southern University, a historically Black university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Thanks to his leadership, Callaloo has expanded significantly over the past four decades and now hosts annual conferences, writing workshops, and book series. In 2002, Dr. Rowell published Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature (St. Martin’s Press), a compilation of notable fiction and poetry works that first appeared in the journal. Currently, Callaloo is published by Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Rowell received his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in English from Binghamton University in New York. He holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Delaware.
