Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

Winner of the 2021 Perugia Press Prize

THROUGH A RED PLACE

By Rebecca Pelky

Rebecca Pelky’s story-in-poems assembles the author’s research into her Native and non-Native heritage in the land now known as Wisconsin. Through the poet’s ancestors—and documented through text and image—this book relates narratives of people who converged on and impacted this space in myriad ways. Written in English and Mohegan, Through a Red Place reshapes itself from page to page, asking what it means to navigate place as both colonizer and colonized. These poems seek the interior and exterior lives of beloved people and places, interacting with archives and visuals to illustrate that what is past continually interrupts and reinscribes itself upon the present. This collection embodies a refusal to go missing despite what’s buried, erased, or built over, much like the ancient mound now covered by an ammunition plant. An inventive collage of geography, history, myth, translation, lineage, erasure, journalism, and photography, Through a Red Place builds a map between distances and lost stories to unearth and honor the past.

 

Rebecca Pelky is a member of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin and a native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She holds a PhD from the University of Missouri, an MFA from Northern Michigan University, and is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Clarkson University in Upstate New York. Through a Red Place is her second poetry collection; her first, Horizon of the Dog Woman, was published by Saint Julian Press in 2020.

* Through a Red Place will be released in September 2021 *

FINALISTS:

Maureen Ash, Permaculture

teri elam, An Observation of Beautiful Forms

Lisbeth White, The Asking Pool: A Mythobiography

SEMI-FINALISTS:

Christina Butcher, Hand to Mouth

Monique-Adelle Callahan D., Rupture

Anaïs Deal-Márquez, I Made You Pozole

Regina DiPerna, The Midwestern Book of the Dead

Mary Kaiser, Hotbed

Zakia Khwaja, Stones Hold Water

Joanne Mallari, Waiting, Washing, Folding

Katherine Maurer, Living in the End Times

Alysse Kathleen McCanna, FishWife

Victoria Lynne McCoy, Wet Reckless

Leonora Simonovis, Study of the Raft

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Kaan and Her Sisters

Thanks to each woman who submitted her manuscript/s & to the volunteers who helped read for & judge the contest!

Perugia Press Prize: A prize of $1000 & publication by Perugia Press is given annually for a first or second unpublished poetry collection by a woman. The next deadline is November 15, 2021.

Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

Press for the 2020 Perugia Press Prize winner 

Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama

Check out a new review in RHINO by Amanda Auchter. An excerpt:

“Balderrama creates a striking juxtaposition between the various immigrant lives in America where one is often ‘swung from the arms of your abuela / into the hills, into the desert, into the river, into the town / of house lights, none of which are yours.’ These are timely, important, devastating poems. ‘Even now,’ the speaker states in ‘Witness,’ ‘bodies are still found in the desert. / I try to listen.’ As readers, we are called to listen to these stories rendered lyric.” 

Listen in to this 5-minute interview, “Utah Poet Explores Family History and Latina Identity in New Collection” on NPR Utah that Caroline Ballard conducted with Jacqueline Balderrama:

Balderrama says, “I think the book, in a way, gave me language for speaking about my identity and confidence about sharing where I come from.”