The AWP Small Press Publisher Award is an annual prize for nonprofit presses and literary journals that recognizes the important role such organizations play in publishing creative works and introducing new authors to the reading public. The award acknowledges the hard work, creativity, and innovation of these presses and journals, and honors their contributions to the literary landscape through their publication of consistently excellent work.
Honorable mentions for the 2026 contest go to our two finalists, The Adroit Journal and Massachusetts Review.
Below is a reflection from Obsidian.
Toward Possibility: Obsidian and the Work of Imagination
For over five decades, Obsidian has served as a site of imaginative inquiry and artistic risk: a place where emerging and established writers and artists can engage the symbolic and material terrain of language, image, performance, and sound. Our mission has always exceeded publication alone. We are interested in how creative work alters perception, expands human possibility, and informs the stories societies tell about themselves.
This is part of why receiving the 2026 AWP Small Press Publisher Award carries such profound meaning for us.
Small press publishing is difficult work—transformative, inspiring, exhausting, and frequently invisible work. It requires vision, persistence, collaboration, improvisation, and care. Those of us who do this work understand the balancing acts involved: the grant applications and budget spreadsheets beside the arrival of a finished issue; the deeply intellectual labor of editing alongside the practical realities of sustaining publication over decades. There is often no clear separation between devotion and exhaustion.
There is a cost. And yet—we are not the price. Accepting the call to service opens up our connection to other people, broadens our sense of self and community, enlarges our duty and capacity of care. At AWP we at Obsidian stand flanked by like-minded others who reach beyond themselves to take on this worthwhile thing (and its companion causes) without expectation of extravagant accolades or lavish praise. Taking on the work of literary publishing with the just reward of the work, shoring up a floundering humanity sputtering in the muck of nonsense.
The AWP Small Press Publisher Award affirms not only the quality of the work Obsidian has published for over fifty years, but also the value of sustaining spaces committed to Black creative and intellectual life. It recognizes the communities, collaborations, and innovation that make literary culture possible. And it reminds us that the work of imagination matters precisely because it shapes the conditions through which people understand themselves and one another.
We are living through a moment in which language itself is under pressure.
Psychiatrist and cultural theorist Robert Jay Lifton uses the phrase “loading the language” to describe the active propagation of “all-encompassing jargon” of “thought-terminating cliché” imposed under systems of violence and authoritarianism: the dulling and hollowing out of words and phrases to effectively empty language of meaning (read alternative facts) until cruelty becomes ordinary, abstraction replaces accountability, and human beings become easier to discard.
Against this erosion, Obsidian remains committed to the poetic impulse—what we might think of at once as the unburdening and revivifying of the language.
We believe literature and art augment the quality of human experience. They resist simplification. They offer complexity, memory, contradiction, beauty, grief, and possibility to public life. Poetry, fiction, criticism, visual art, and performance can slow perception long enough for people to encounter one another differently. They can help us imagine futures beyond the confines of fear, spectacle, and domination.
If imagination were powerless, there would be no effort to suppress it.
And so our work continues not from naivete, but from an understanding that cultural work matters profoundly. The attacks on books, education, voting rights, bodily autonomy, historical memory, and democratic participation across the United States reveal how deeply intertwined imagination and power truly are. Institutions and communities committed to language, art, and critical thought become essential sites of resistance and possibility during such moments.
At Obsidian, we remain invested in publishing work that refuses diminishment.
This orientation toward possibility also shapes how we think about the future.
Within some African philosophical traditions, we are said to move “behind us into the future.” The past and present remain visible, carried collectively as memory, inheritance, and knowledge. To move forward, then, is not to abandon what came before, but to proceed with an awareness of ancestral labor, unfinished struggle, and accumulated wisdom.
That philosophy resonates deeply with Obsidian’s mission at this moment in our history.
As we celebrate over fifty years of continuous publication, we are thinking not only about legacy, but about becoming. What new forms will emerge? What conversations remain possible? What communities can still be built through art, language, and critical engagement? How might literary culture continue to foster connection and democratic imagination during periods of fragmentation and uncertainty?
These questions feel especially resonant as we look toward the 2027 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Chicago.
Chicago holds particular significance for Obsidian. As one of our institutional homes and a city shaped by layered histories of migration, labor, music, performance, activism, and Black cultural production, Chicago offers an important backdrop for AWP’s sixtieth-anniversary conference. It is a city of movement and contradiction, but also of extraordinary artistic invention and community making.
At a time when many people feel isolated, exhausted, or uncertain about the future, such gatherings matter.
They remind us that literature is not created alone, even when writing itself often occurs in solitude. Publishing, teaching, editing, mentoring, organizing, imagining—these are collective acts. They emerge from networks of care, labor, and belief.
And so we receive this award in that spirit: with gratitude for all who have contributed to Obsidian across five decades, and with continued faith in the transformative capacities of Black imagination, artistic innovation, and human language itself.
While we are here, while we yet dream, we continue to do our part.
Obsidian cultivates, through publication and critical inquiry, Black imagination and innovation—supporting Black, African, and African Diaspora creatives globally. In 1975 Alvin Aubert founded the journal as Obsidian: Black Literature in Review. Through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the journal was published under the names Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review and Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora. In 2014, current editor Duriel E. Harris expanded the journal to a full publishing platform and exhibited a new subtitle, Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Obsidian is now celebrating over fifty years of continuous publication.