Available for Preorder: 2024 Raz-Shumaker Book Prize Winners

We have some exciting news to share: Gbenga Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea and Mi Jin Kim’s Invitation: Stories, our winners of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Prize in Poetry and Fiction, are available for preorder and will be coming out through the University of Nebraska Press in September 2025.

Death Does Not End at the Sea, which was the winner of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, is Gbenga Adesina’s debut book of poems. It explores exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, as well as the relationship between father and son. It tells the story of a son who dreams his dead father travels with him in search of the ghost of James Baldwin, tracing their journey to Paris, France, Turkey, Senegal, and across the Mediterranean Sea with a group of immigrants. Matthew Shenoda described it as a “requiem for kinship,” a book which “bridges memory both personal and collective with the migratory movements of global Black life.” Terrance Hayes said it “is more than a debut, it’s a revelation.”

Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist, and he is the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. Preorder Death Does Not End at the Sea here.

Mi Jin Kim’s collection of stories, Invitation, was the winner of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction. Set mostly in South Korea, the stories involve people reaching out to people, trying and failing to connect. It is a book about connection. It involves the memories of family members, crushes, friends, and loved ones which shape people into who they are. Peter Ho Davies called the book “an exquisite debut,” saying “Mi Jin Kim’s themes are enduring—loneliness and longing, absence and loss—but she revivifies them with a preternatural acuity of detail (the tenuousness of Korean middle-class life is keenly felt) and a mordant reverence for the mysteries of the human condition.”

Mi Jin Kim, who Douglas Trevor referred to as “a postmodern Chekhov,” was born in Seoul and grew up in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and she lives in rural South Korea with her family. Preorder Mi Jin Kim’s Invitation here.