Sjohnna McCray’s debut collection was selected by Tracy K. Smith for the 2015 Walt Whitman Award, given to enable the publication of a poet’s first book and to encourage the work of emerging poets. In the judge's citation, Smith writes, “These poems are so beautifully crafted, so courageous in their truth-telling, and so full of what I like to think of as lyrical wisdom—the visceral revelations that only music, gesture and image, working together, can impart. Not only did they stop me in my tracks as a judge, but they changed me as a person. Sjohnna McCray’s is an ecstatic and original voice, and he lends it to family, history, race and desire in ways that are healing and enlarging. Rapture announces a prodigious talent and a huge human heart.”