St. Louis Native Wins 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award for Poetry
Poet Alison Rollins’ collection Black Bell is the winner of the fifth annual Maya Angelou Book Award, announced at the Writers for Readers fundraiser dinner on November 20.
The prize is named for acclaimed Missouri-born memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou and celebrates contemporary writers whose work demonstrates a commitment to social justice.
Rollins, an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is also the author of Library of Small Catastrophes.
She says that winning the prize “feels incredibly affirming and rewarding. This project is so steeped in freedom-seeking and explorations of the archive and archival work. And so, it feels absolutely amazing for it to be recognized in this way and to be in conversation with the other previous winners.”
The collection’s title refers to the 18th and 19th century practice of enslavers rigging bells to the enslaved to prevent escape and is rich with graphics like diagrams, lithographs, ancient advertisements, and shape poems. It ruminates on themes of history, resistance, and liberation with ambitious, inventive imagery and sound.
A bell-shaped poem called “A Bell Is a Messenger of Time” opens the book and begins: The neck’s/heavy load/is light-headed./The single sound,/everywhere at once./Black bell, black bell,/have you any cool?
Each year, the prize alternates between poetry and fiction; Taylor Byas, the 2023 poetry recipient, acted as this year’s guest judge. Tasked with choosing a winner from the five finalists who emerged from over 200 submissions, she says she had her work cut out for her.
“I ultimately selected Black Bell due to its exceptional blend of formal craft, lyricism, music, and humor. Rollins confronts a dark history but does so with a ferocity that kept me glued to the pages,” Byas says. “I gasped, I cried, I laughed, I read the poems aloud and danced along with their music.”
The award is administered by Kaite Stover, the Library’s director of readers’ services, with help from a UMKC graduate student acting as the Maya Angelou Book Fellow. For the 2025 award, that was Alex Tretbar.
Stover says that waiting for the guest judge’s selection every year is a thrill.
“This year's winner will stir the heart: Rollins is a librarian-poet. A reader can see the respect for words and ideas and truth in the shape of her poems and her insistence on preserving history with every line,” Stover says.
The prize includes a $10,000 stipend, and Rollins will conduct a book tour with stops at the Library and the six Missouri universities that participate in the award: UMKC, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Missouri State University, and Northwest Missouri State, Truman State, and Southeast Missouri State universities.
“I never got to meet Maya Angelou in person,” Rollins says, “but I was always looking for connective tissue or ways to kind of be in community with her lineage and her journey through her writing experiences.
“It is such an honor to be in dialogue in this way, especially work being celebrated in relationship to social justice,” she continues. “I am a strong supporter and advocate for public library workers, so to be aligned with the Kansas City Public Library is absolutely fantastic.”
