Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize
Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize
NOW IN COLOR
By Jacqueline Balderrama
Now in Color explores the multigenerational immigrant experience of Mexican-Americans who have escaped violence, faced pressures to assimilate, and are now seeking 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.
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 (FLP 2019) and is co-poetry editor for Quarterly West and Iron City Magazine. Balderrama has been involved in the Letras Latinas initiative, the ASU Prison Education Program, and the Wasatch Writers in the Schools.
* Now in Color will be released in September 2020 *
Pre-order advanced copies @ AWP, on sale @ Perugia's table, #1941.
FINALISTS:
Stephanie Glazier, Some Formidable Lily
Victoria Lynne McCoy, wet reckless
SEMI-FINALISTS:
Sarah Anderson, Come Back. I Have Kept Time.
Stacey Balkun, Sweetbitter
Mirande Bissell, Stalin at the Opera
Caroline Crew, Bucolia
Regina DiPerna, The Midwestern Book of the Dead
Mary Moore Easter, From the Flutes of Our Bones
Janlori Goldman, My Antarctica
Danielle Jones, Landscapes with Alternate Endings
Kelly Morse, Abcission
Catherine Staples, Vert
Sophia Starmack, The Grief Sweater
Gabriella R. Tallmadge, Sweet Beast
Shannon K. Winston, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings
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Perugia Press Prize: A prize of $1000 & publication by Perugia Press is given annually for a first or second unpublished poetry collection by a woman.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, 2020.
