The 2025 winner of the California Young Book Collector’s Prize is Kierra Duncan. Kierra is 27 years old. She was raised in the Los Angeles area and graduated from UCLA summa cum laude in English and current doctoral candidate at Princeton University. 


Duncan's collection, “Translating Blackness Across Space:  American, British, and Caribbean Editions of 20th Century Black Literature.” wowed the judges with her collection Translating Blackness Across Space: American, British, and Caribbean Editions of 20th-Century Black Literature. Duncan brought together works by Toni Morrison, V.S. Reid, Gayl Jones, George Lamming, Eric Walrond, and Sylvia Wynter to chronicle and analyze manifestations of Black identity in anglophone literature and publishing. Along with collecting the work of iconic twentieth-century Black writers, Duncan examined book design, marketing, and other paratext to gain insight into how publishers communicated Black stories when selling books to new national audiences.

Duncan wrote that her collection was "driven by two needs. First, the urge to figure out what that sticky, elusive something is that made Black inaccessible when published in another English speaking nation. Second, to identify the (un)conscious methods deployed by publishers to address this problem before the reader even began the book. I remain guided by a question: What alterations were made to a literary text in order to make it accessible to other English speaking nations? To explore this query...I gather different editions of the same work in order to compare what changed when the book was published in another Anglophone country...Over time my collection has guided me to see the transformations in these scenarios as a translation. In this sense, Translating Blackness Across Space relies on a unique definition of translation. I see translation as the process of altering a novel’s visual appearance, paratext, and marketing so that it becomes accessible to audiences in another nation. The obstacle to accessibility is not linguistic difference, but the audience's presumed unfamiliarity with the national history that informs the literature and its characters."

A selection of Duncan's collection will be displayed at the 57th ABAA California International Antiquarian Book Fair (Feb 7 – 9). so make sure to stop by Duncan's display to take a look at her collection and chat with her about her extraordinary work. Get your tickets to the fair here...

Sponsored by the Southern and Northern California Chapters of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, The California Young Book Collector’s Prize is open to collectors aged 35 and under who are living in California. All collections of books, manuscripts, and ephemera are welcome, no matter their monetary value or subject.

The purpose of The California Young Book Collector’s Prize is to nurture the next generation of bibliophiles. The collections are judged on their thoroughness, the approach to their subject, and the seriousness which with the collector has catalogued his or her material.

As the winner of the competition, she was awarded:

A cash prize of $500, which may be spent at the California Antiquarian Book Fair

A stipend of $500 towards exhibition expenses (to help cover travel costs, showcase labels, and insurance)

A year’s membership to the Book Club of California

A year's subscription to The Book Collector

A year’s membership to the Bibliographical Society of America

A year’s subscription to Fine Books & Collections magazine

Submission details for future prizes are available from Carol Sandberg.

Plan to visit the upcoming 57th ABAA California International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Pasadena Convention Center. Both domestic and international exhibitors will be offering rare books, manuscripts, maps, and ephemera, most of which will be new material offered here for the first time. In addition, special lectures will be offered all three days of the fair; view the speaker lineup here.