This spring was a most fruitful season for Cleveland poet Kortney Morrow.
In addition to launching her debut book of poems, “Run It Back,” in March and having her poem “French 75” drop in the April issue of Atlantic magazine, as program director for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA), Morrow also got to announce the 2026 winners.
The prestigious juried prize – the first and still only of its kind – has been recognizing books that deepen the understanding of racism and human diversity since another Cleveland poet Edith Anisfield-Wolf founded the award 91 years ago.
“What an incredible human to have the prescience in 1935 to establish this prize and also the prescience to know that endowment would be a way to ensure that the prize could live on for a long time far beyond her life,” Morrow said. The prize has been administered by the Cleveland Foundation since Anisfield-Wolf’s death in1963.
Edith established the awards to honor her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for issues of social justice. Originally, the Saturday Review sponsored the awards.
“She had the foresight both as a poet and as a Jewish woman who looked around the city of Cleveland and saw segregation and rising anti-Semitism and decided to establish this prize,” Morrow continued.
On Wednesday, April 15, at a private luncheon in New York, the AWBA jurors announced the 2026 award winners:
Gbenga Adesina won the Poetry Award for his collection “Death Does not End at the Sea.”
Bench Ansfield won the Nonfiction Award for his book “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City”
Carrie R. Moore won the Fiction Award for her anthology “Make Your Way Home.”
Sarah Aziza claimed the Memoir Award for her book “The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders.”
The Lifetime Achievement Award went to historian, author and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter.
Morrow’s whirlwind first year as program director
Upon graduating with her MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University in August 2022, Morrow co-founded Studio Reciprocity, a consulting business.
She had previously worked for several years with 826, a nonprofit organization that operates youth writing centers, in Chicago, where she earned her BA in Communications and Media Studies. Morrow then moved to New Orleans to open the agency’s first chapter there in its national network and later worked with 826 in Toronto.
She and her partner at Studio Reciprocity collaborated with artists and nonprofit arts organizations in New Orleans, and a few in Cleveland, helping them develop strategic and fundraising plans.
The Cleveland Foundation learned about the work she was doing and hired Morrow to consult for the AWBA.
“I felt that, to have a sense of culture, I needed to leave Cleveland and see the world, but I wonder what it would have been like if I had known about the legacy of Anisfield-Wolf as a younger kid,” Morrow said “I didn’t learn about it until I circled back to Ohio to get my MFA and was trying to understand the literary ecosystem in Columbus and Cleveland, but I thought ‘What a hidden gem. More people need to know about this prize.’”
In February 2024, the Cleveland Foundation hired a programming director to replace Karen Long, who had guided AWBA for 11 years. In September, that person unexpectedly resigned the week of the awards. The foundation then hired Morrow to step into the role full-time in May 2025.
“To have a practicing poet in charge is in the spirit of Edith, and Kortney being local, growing up in Shaker, also makes her close to Edith’s spirit,” said Long. “I find her to be wise, soulful and discerning, and I sleep well at night knowing Kortney’s in charge.”
According to Long, most of the AWBA’s history was a quiet check-writing exercise in keeping with Edith’s low profile, until Cleveland Foundation president and executive director (1994-2003) Steve Minter and Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who won an AWBA for nonfiction in 1989, thought there should be something more in it for Clevelanders.
“The first marking, I believe, was a quiet tea at the [Cleveland] Foundation, and the person that Steve and Skip turned to was Mary Louise Hahn, then me, and now Kortney to have the privilege of shepherding the winners into the world and promote them and their art as meaningful for readers, so it’s been a really precious sorority.”
Morrow’s first year of leadership just happened to coincide with the AWBA’s 90th anniversary.
“I stepped into this role in a milestone year with a lot of different ideas on how to celebrate that milestone,” Morrow said. “We launched a host committee for the first time made up of more than 30 community stakeholders that were long-time supporters of Anisfield-Wolf at different universities, local authors, leaders of literary arts institutions and advocates, and that group was just bustling with ideas.”
A few months before the 90th annual awards ceremony in September, Morrow and her team began to implement those new initiatives such as modifying the existing Cleveland Book Week, a series of events throughout the city that feature that year’s winners.
Morrow worked with the event’s eight partners – including Literary Cleveland, the City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland Public Library and Cuyahoga County Public Library – to expand the program into Cleveland Book Fest, which now includes events throughout the entire month of September.
Morrow and team even requested that Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb record a new message at the airport during the week of the 90th anniversary so that arriving visitors could learn about AWBA.
Morrow also redesigned the awards ceremony held in The Temple, the historic section of the Maltz Performing Arts Center in University Circle, including incorporating music for the first time.
She commissioned The Candlelight Lounge group comprised of Karamu House Executive Artist Director Tony Sias, AJ Kluth, Bill Ransom and Dave Thomas to perform an original jazz composition to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa who received the Lifetime Achievement Award last year.
“Komunyakaa’s work is heavily influenced by jazz and blues,” Morrow explained. “So we sent the group two of his poems, and they selected one and took it from there and crafted this incredible jazz piece based on that.”
Morrow also invited all of the approximately 80 living AWBA winners to attend the ceremony and about 20 of them did.
“We treated them to just a lovely weekend,” Morrow said. “Some of them were involved in a series of events in addition to the ceremony as part of Cleveland Book Fest, and they all enjoyed getting to know each other.”
The night of the awards event, Morrow requested that the intersection of Ansel Road and East 105th street where the Maltz is located be shut down so that patrons could safely cross East 105th to attend the after-party at Park Lane Villa.
There, in addition to refreshments, patrons could purchase the winning authors’ books and have them autographed or just chat with the writers. Previously, that was done backstage at The Temple.
“We moved the book sales into that same area, so that was a success and book sales increased,” Morrow said. “Mac’s Backs said they sold more books in the first 20 minutes than they had the previous year. That’s exciting. The authors signed for 90 minutes straight.”
Most importantly, AWBA tripled its cash prize from $10,000 to $30,000 for the four main genre categories. That number doubles the amount Pulitzer Prize winners receive.
“I’m happy about that boldness and about Lillian Kuri’s commitment, the Board’s commitment,” Long said. “I love the boldness of putting more dollars into the prize to elevate its profile, and I’m watching and hoping for a matching boldness in support for Kortney in budget and staff.”
AWBA also named its first-ever memoir winner last year, Tessa Hulls. Several weeks later, she won the Pulitzer for memoir, as well.
“We tripled the cash prize, so that we could pour it into artists who we believe that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, people will look back and think these are the titles that helped shaped how we think about race and literature and shaped our understanding of how we related to one another,” Morrow said. “We are hopeful that by encouraging people to engage with not only the writers but the content of the books that slowly there will be this transformation towards something different.”
A literary crawl
On the Saturday after the awards evening, as a culminating event for Cleveland Book Fest, Morrow worked with her team to plan a rich itinerary of events they call the AWBA Literary Crawl.
“That was a new innovation, too,” Morrow said. “Previously, we had spread out events leading up to the ceremony with one every night, so last year we did it all in a row.”
The day starts at the Bop Stop, where winner Danzy Senna conversed with author and AWBA Juror Deesha Philyaw before everyone moved onto the nearby Transformer Station, where Hulls’ artwork was projected onto the walls, and she was in conversation with juror Peter Ho Davies.
Next, the crawl continued at St. John’s Church, where winner Jonathan Schroeder gave opening comments before a Karamu House ensemble of actors brought his book “A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography” to life. AWBA winner Janice Harrington closed out the day by reading her poems at Ohio City Farms.
“The crawl that happens in Ohio City that Saturday after the ceremony was just a smart, great strategy and people really enjoyed it,” said Matt Weinkam, executive director of Literary Cleveland. “All those events were wonderful, and every one was packed.”
Now that Morrow has the 2026 winners, she and her team of partners can start planning similar events for Saturday, Sept. 19, the day after this year’s awards ceremony.
Morrow the poet
Prior to the 2026 award’s announcement, Morrow had some time to return to Ohio City to launch her first collection of poems “Run It Back” at Visible Voice Books’ new location.
In March, she also participated in Literary Cleveland’s “Plum City” reading series and Loganberry Books’ “Broadsides & Ephemera” monthly poetry reading series. She will also travel to Columbus and Dallas, Texas, to do readings in support of her book.
Much of her time for the next several months, however, will be to plan and schedule events for the 91st annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards around the primary ceremony on Friday, Sept. 18.
The response to all of the changes and innovations Morrow brought to last year’s Anisfield-Wolf experience was quite positive.
“At the awards ceremony and her most recent book launch, the energy of the crowd and their support for her you could just hear it in people’s voices that she has already built a community of people who see and recognize the quality of her work,” said Weinkam. “We could not be more thrilled than to have someone like her leading the awards.”
The Cleveland Foundation and the AWBA jurors have also been supportive in amplifying Morrow’s and her team’s work as well as showcasing the work of the winners. They are all currently consulting with a public relations firm to increase awareness of the AWBA nationally.
“Every day there’s something new that I get to interact with, strategize on, and I would say the local Cleveland literary ecosystem has been incredibly bolstering,” Morrow said.
“All of our efforts are to ensure that every single resident in the Greater Cleveland area engages with a book for the month of September.”
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