Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

Winner of the 2026 Perugia Press Prize

Everything Has Been Moved,

Even the Dead

By Jen Siraganian

In her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, Jen Siraganian traces a self shaped by history, fragmentation, and memory as she weaves her family’s past in the Middle East with her identity as an Armenian-American woman and mother. Whether portraying a grandparent’s survival during the Armenian Genocide, a father’s childhood in 1940s Palestine, or a son’s birth when “death is a neighbor,” Siraganian’s poems interrogate concepts of home, origins, belonging, and displacement. Using a docupoetic lens, the poet braids narratives with archival photographs and artifacts to chart cycles of cultural and historic erasure while enacting an intertextual conversation with artists of the diaspora, and with art itself. Through poems that seed each other with recurring images of pomegranates, mushrooms, and fire, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead pushes against annihilation with a voice that resists silence. 

 

Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator & former poet laureate of Los Gatos, California. Author of the chapbook Fracture, her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets & Poetry Daily & has won the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She has received funding from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Community of Writers & Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. A former managing director of Litquake literary festival, she is currently a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center.

 

Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead

will be released in September 2026

FINALISTS:

Xinyue Huang, /yù/: Territory, Desire

Mollie O’Leary, Touchstruck

SEMI-FINALISTS:

 

Shlagha Borah, daughterline

Ja’net Danielo, Eclipse

Lynne Ellis, Parallel to Shore

Shivani Gupta, Turmeric Dust Stains/Assimilates

Kelsea Habecker, North Wife

Dani Janae, Express Desire

April Lim, Joss Paper

Ruby Hansen Murray, Where We’ve Always Been

Nikelle, Altar Girl

Jennifer Pons, Gospel of Bees

Amanda Roth, Elegy for My Father’s God

Mary Simmons, Fruiting Bodies All Over the Earth

Brett Warren, Between Storms

 

 

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, inclusive of gender-expansive identities. Next deadline is 11/15/26.

Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

Perugia Press at AWP in Baltimore

 

We're excited to be heading to Baltimore this week for AWP 2026! You can find Perugia Press at Table #833 in the bookfair, where many of our poets will be signing books each day. We're also co-hosting a collaborative offsite event with the wonderful organizations SWWIM, MER, Whale Road Review, NELLE & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry. Join us at Westminster Hall, 519 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD on 3/4 for this beautiful event, and stop by to visit us at the bookfair. 

 

 

 

Winner of the 2020 Perugia Press Prize

Holli Carrell Apostasies

 * March Events *

 

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

Perugia Press January Intern:

Audrey Jiggetts

 

Read Board President Jean Blakeman's interview with 

 intern Audrey Jiggetts about her experiences at Perugia

Press and with poetry. Gratitude to Jean, to Smith College, 

 and to Audrey - it was a joy to work with you! 

 

One project of note Audrey created was a poetry film for

our series "Flux and Flow," inspired by Holli Carrell's poem "How Much: A Poem for Maria" from her book Apostasies.

Watch the film on YouTube, and please subscribe while there!