Congratulations to Natalie Scenters-Zapico, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for her 2015 book of poetry, The Verging Cities!
Excerpt from the judges' statements:
"Natalie Scenters-Zapico's poems in The Verging Cities travel back and forth across the borders of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, across the gritty, dangerous realities of border zones, and across the bodily and emotional boundaries of lovers from opposite sides of the borders. But this description is much more orderly and plain than these wildly imaginative poems, whose essential metaphoric and metamorphic gestures keep transforming body, self, soul, and city into each other. Scenters-Zapico engages an impressive and virtuosic variety of poetic forms and rhetorical structures, offering evidence that this poet—and this book—is in search of the right code to express something that doesn’t want to hold still. By turns erotic and ironic, The Verging Cities bears witness to the way both the body and the psyche register what it means to dwell in between. Politics is everywhere implicated in the blood, bones, ghosts of the dead. Scenters-Zapico gives powerful expression to the interweaving of identity and womanhood in the modern terms and landscapes of a border setting. These border poems have duende and they are at once deeply personal and openly public in their provocations."
As the winner, Natalie will be visiting several GLCA member colleges between September 2016 and April 2017 to give readings, sign books, and talk with students and faculty members.
