Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

* Perugia Press at AWP in L.A. *

 

We're excited to be heading to Los Angeles this 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:

In addition to the authors present below, we'll have

signed bookplates on hand for our latest publication,

Joan Kwon Glass's Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms.

 

Also, we'll be taking preorders for our

2025 Perugia Press Prize winner, Apostasies 

 by Holli Carrell, at a special AWP discount.

 

 

 

Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

Good news is worth sharing more than once...

 

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

Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms News & Reviews: 

 

Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms received two new reviews, one by Erica Goss in Sticks & Stones, 

and one by Lizzy Ke Polishan in Psaltery & Lyre.

 

 

Joan Kwon Glass's Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms 

 earned a post-publication prize accolade 

 from the Poetry Society of Virginia!

 

 

And here are a few pictures from recent events

with Joan Kwon Glass:

 

K. Iver and Joan Kwon Glass in conversation

at Smith College

 

Tiana Clark and Joan Kwon Glass in conversation

at Possible Futures Books in New Haven, CT

 

Former Perugia intern and Amherst College student

Evelyn Chi with Joan Kwon Glass and Editor/Director Rebecca Olander at Amherst College

 

*

 

NEXT EVENT: Joan Kwon Glass will be featured in POETRY at the BARN’s “Home Edition” on Saturday, March 29 at 7pm EDT. This online event includes a featured poet and a friendly open mic after the feature. Email host Karen Lee Ramos at RMAApoetry@yahoo.com for the Zoom link prior to event.

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

* Poet News *

Lisbeth White's American Sycamore was featured in the Black History Month showcase at Asterism Books

*

  Megan Peak's Girldom was featured in the Women's History Month showcase at Asterism Books

*

Amanda Auchter's The Wishing Tomb and Ida Stewart's Gloss were featured in CLMP's 2025 Women's History Month reading list

*

Joan Kwon Glass had a new poem "Going Home"

in Passages North.

*

L. I. Henley had her essay, “Return of the Maker,” published in Mississippi Review in “The Art Issue.” 

And Henley's “Essay Made of Little, Lonely Bones”

won Terrain.org's 15th Annual Nonfiction Contest