Amsterdam Book Prize
judge & Reading Team
Readers joined our editorial team in 2021-2022 to review and consider submissions for the 2022 Amsterdam Open Book Prize. In May, a shortlist of 12 works was sent to judge Raina León. The winner and runner-up will be announced in July.
Reading team
Contest judge
Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua and from Philadelphia. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013, Salmon Poetry), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). Salmon Poetry also published sombra : (dis)locate. Her first chapbook, profeta without refuge, was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker award. Her second chapbook, Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self, was published by Alley Cat Books (2019). Her fourth collection, *black god mother this body*, will come out from Black Freighter Press in 2022. She’s currently at work on a multigenre exploration of blackness in color, academia, art as resistance, and the preservation of a whole and humanized spirit. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. With Dr. Norma Thomas, she co-founded StoryJoy, Inc. dedicated to creating flourishing spaces for BIPOC creatives and human service providers to boldly and radically imagine and build the worlds of our rest, wholeness, revolutionary joy, and thriving. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education.