PUBLISHING NEW WOMEN POETS SINCE 1997
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Now in Color
by Jacqueline Balderrama
Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize
for a first or second book of poetry by a woman
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“For Jacqueline Balderrama, identity is an ‘accounted nothingness.’ It is an unrecovered reel of the two sides of Rita Hayworth: one, a long-name Hispanic, the other, a silver-screen ether. It is a Mobius double-sided ribbon of family remembrances, borderland maps, suffering treks across the blistering earth, and a text to ‘ collect what is scattered.’ Enter Picasso’s circus scenes, Kahlo’s ripped chest dangling, Varo’s multi-dimensional floating woman, Monet’s crumbling fertile bridge, da Vinci’s moon ocean. This is the real-to-unreal figure, the lost movie, the outsider’s invitation to escape together into her Technicolor vortex of fractured meditations and, most of all, her art of becoming. Now in Color is wild and radical in form, iridescent in blood and genre.”
- Juan Felipe Herrera,
Poet Laureate of the United States
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BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Now in Color explores the multigenerational immigrant experience of Mexican-Americans who have escaped violence, faced pressures to assimilate, and now seek to reconnect to a fragmented past. These poems illuminate the fluidity of language and of perception through both small hypocrisies and real atrocities. One of Balderrama’s strategies is to use the development of motion pictures and Technicolor as a lens through which to examine personal and cultural histories and stereotypes. She also considers bilingual expectations through an innovative series of Spanish definition poems. Balderrama documents pieces of her family’s oral tradition and draws connections to ongoing injustices experienced by current migrant families, offering a living picture of a present inevitably tied to and colored by its past. Through the poetics of witness, ekphrasis, portraiture, and family mythos, Now in Color deepens our understanding of hybrid identities and calls attention to those impacted by tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Author photo by Jesus Huerta Jr.
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Jacqueline Balderrama lives and teaches in Salt Lake City, where she is a doctoral candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. She is the author of the chapbook Nectar and Small (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and a poetry editor for Iron City Magazine and Quarterly West. Balderrama has been involved in the Letras Latinas literary initiative, the ASU Prison Education Program, and the Wasatch Writers in the Schools.
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SUBMISSIONS OPEN ON AUGUST 1st
2021 Perugia Press Prize
for a First or Second Book by a Woman
Prize: $1000 and publication
Submit manuscripts between August 1 and November 15, 2020
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* WE HAVE A NEW WEBSITE *
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new Perugia Press website! Our site includes, among other things, an improved bookshop experience, new ways to support the press, a news & blog offering, and the addition of free classroom resources for many of our books. It's a beautiful site that shows off our pride and joy: our books and the emerging women poets who wrote them. Thanks to Being Wicked for working with us to design and bring this site to life, and much gratitude to the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts for awarding our non-profit a capacity-building grant to support the development of this new site. As part of this occasion, we've also joined Instagram. Please connect with us on Instagram @perugiapress and check out our new website at perugiapress.org!
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PERUGIA PRESS
PO Box 60364, Florence, MA 01062
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