Frank X Walker Wins NAACP Image Award for Poetry

Posted on February 26, 2014

Frank X Walker is the winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry. Walker is currently the Kentucky Poet Laureate and an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Walker won the award for his collection, Turn Me Loose: the Unghosting of Medgar Evers.

Evers was involved in efforts to overturn segregation in Mississippi and active in the civil rights movement. The poems in the collection capture the emotion both before and after Evers' assassination in 1963.

Nikki Giovanni and Jammal May were among the other nominees. Here is the list of the five finalists:

• Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid by Nikki Giovanni (HarperCollins, William Morrow)
• Hum by Jamaal May (Alice James Books)
• The Cineaste: Poems by A. Van Jordan (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
• The Collected Poems of Ai - Ai (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
• Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers by Frank X Walker (University of Georgia Press)