2025 Cave Canem Prize Weekly Reading Group

Join Cave Canem Fellow Sa Whitley for a weekly gathering to closely read and dissect Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne, winner of the 25th Anniversary Cave Canem Prize.

About Natural History

A research biologist most recently at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Brandon Kilbourne illuminates the intersections between science and poetry in poems that demonstrate the wonder, curiosity, and precision required by both disciplines.

Natural History opens by confronting the hidden histories within the study of biology and its links to colonialism, including the revelation that European scientists used slave ships to transport specimens from Africa and the Americas back to Europe. Across the collection, Kilbourne describes how these histories of exploitation are still reflected in dioramas of elephants, rhinoceroses, and African people displayed in natural history museums. Other poems narrate the intricate work of studying fossils, and a longer sequence recounts an expedition above the Arctic Circle to recover evidence of how a fish’s fins gave rise to the diversity of limbs found among amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

Natural History is a rare and fascinating debut, and Kilbourne’s exquisite eye brings the role of the working biologist to life.

About Brandon Kilbourne

Brandon Kilbourne (2024) is a Pushcart-nominated poet and biologist, whose work has appeared in Poet Lore, Obsidian, Ecotone, Terrain.org, West Trade Review, Split Rock Review, and numerous other literary journals. Writing poems intertwined with natural history, he has given readings at conferences on entomology, natural history, and paleontology in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Born in Louisiana, he earned his BS in Biological Engineering at Louisiana State University before earning his PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. Having worked more than twenty years in natural history, he has worked at museums in Denver, Chicago, and Berlin, and has worked with collections and done fieldwork across the globe. Throughout his career, his scientific studies have appeared in such journals as Evolution and Science Advances and have received support from the German Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation. In 2014-2015, he was a College for Life Sciences Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, where he also first started to seriously pursue poetry. In 2024, he was Artist-in-Residence in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University. In 2025, he was a Cave Canem Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2025 Cave Canem Prize. His first poetry collection, Natural History, will be published in autumn 2025 by Graywolf Press.