Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

Winner of the 2025 Perugia Press Prize

APOSTASIES

By Holli Carrell

Holli Carrell’s debut collection Apostasies explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology. Interweaving prose, documentary poems, translations, erasures, and spare, imagistic lyrics, Apostasies aims to recover and reclaim the body by its own definition. Casting her experience within the broader narrative of Mormonism, Carrell unpacks the fraught history of gender and polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormonism, exposing the sexual predation and grooming tactics used by Joseph Smith—Mormonism’s founder—on his thirty-three “wives,” many of whom were fourteen to eighteen years old at the time of their marriage. Courageous and defiant, the poems in Apostasies ultimately celebrate doubt and disobedience; they challenge oppressive constructions of womanhood and cisnormativity, in particular rejecting motherhood, “obedience,” and religious traditions that vilify independent thought and bodily autonomy. 

 

Holli Carrell was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and now lives

in the Midwest, where she is completing her PhD in Creative Writing with

a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. A 2024-2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The North American Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Salt Hill, among other journals.

 

Apostasies will be released in September 2025

FINALISTS:

 

teri elam, Digging Thru the Bones

Leila Farjami, Future Epitaph

Jen Siraganian, Journal for Half-Eaten Pomegranates

 

SEMI-FINALISTS:

 

Laurel Anderson, The Xylem Canticles

Jia-Rui Cook, Soft Beasts

Cristi Donoso, Certain Species of Want

Alicia Elkort, To Mother Some Small Living Thing

Lynne Ellis, Parallel to Shore

Jessica Freeman, Songs for the Father of Waters

Samantha Futhey, Geophagy

Sera Gamble, town crier

Christell Victoria Roach, Overtown Crown

Sarah Stinnett, The Hard Problem

Amy Thatcher, Rick James in the Garden of Eden

Anna Lowe Weber, Variations on a Domestic Theme

 

Thanks to all the poets who submitted their manuscript/s 

& to the volunteers who helped read for & judge the contest!

Perugia Press Prize: A prize of $2000 & publication by Perugia Press 

 is given annually for a first or second poetry collection by a woman, including all gender-expansive definitions of that term.

The next deadline is November 15, 2025.

Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press PrizeAPress for the 2020 Perugia Press Prize winner Per

Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight

March 2025 Poet: Nadia Alexis

 

 

Photographing Your Mother

She’s in a blue sequin gown,

blood-red heels & headwrap

colored kaleidoscope.

She is birthsong, her own

city, generous mountain.

When you press the shutter

your eyes are no longer yours.

You are ocean & every speckle

in you weeps. Each selfless gesture

of her is on display. You press

the shutter, only gift you know how

to give. It doesn’t matter

that everything tried to get

in the way. Here she sits with bells

for eyes, her cheekbones &

life lines rise, adorned sanctuaries.

This time—one of a few

when you’ve not failed

as her daughter. Smeared, forgotten

sins. Both your feathers new.

 

 

from Beyond the Watershed (CavanKerry Press, 2025)

 

To read about this poet and her work, check out our blog.

Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

* Perugia Press at AWP in L.A. *

 

We're excited to be heading to Los Angeles next week for AWP 2025! You can find Perugia Press at Table #510 in the bookfair, where many of our poets, and one of our board members, will be signing books each day. We're also co-hosting a collaborative offsite event with the wonderful organizations SWWIM, MER, Whale Road Review & Cultivating Voices Live Poetry. Join us at MG Studio on 3/27 for this beautiful event, and stop by to visit us at the bookfair. 

 

Bookfair Author Signings at T#510:

Melody S. Gee: Thursday 11:00-12:00

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn: Friday 10:00-11:00

Jennifer K. Sweeney: Friday 11:00-12:00

Rebecca Pelky: Friday 2:00-3:00

Carolina Hotchandani: Friday 3:00-4:00

Lynne Thompson: Saturday 10:00-11:00

Jacqueline Balderrama: Saturday 11:00-12:00

We'll also have signed bookplates on hand for our latest book,

Joan Kwon Glass's Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms!