Natalie ScentersZapico

2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award

Hemming Flames

Patricia Colleen Murphy

2017 MHA Book Award for Best Biography

Hosea Stout

Stephen L. Prince

2017 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction

The Man Who Thought He Owned Water

Tershia d'Elgin

2016 CWPA Special Award for Outstanding Scholarship

Naming What We Know

edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle

2017 Ka Palapala Po'okela Aloha from Across the Sea Award

Taken from the Paradise Isle

Edited by Heidi Kim

2017 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Transnational Writing Program Administration

edited by David S. Martins

2016 Utah Book Award for Poetry & 2017 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry

The Verging Cities

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

2017 Pub West Book Design Awards

Photography Book—Bronze Medal

Yellowstone National Park

Bradly J. Boner

"Mouth in My Kitchen" is a poem from the award-winning book The Verging Cities, from the Center for Literary Publishing's Mountain West Poetry Series.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, United States, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Believer, American Poets, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and Palabra. She currently lives in Salt Lake City with her husband, José Angel Maldonado.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico, author of The Verging Cities, has been invited to be the featured poet for the 2019 Poetry Coalition. Each March, members present programming across the country on a theme of social importance. Programs range from publications to panels, readings, and other public events. This year's theme is "What Is It, Then, Between Us?: Poetry & Democracy.”

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.

Congratulations to Natalie Scenters-Zapico, who has won the NACCS-Tejas Foco Best Poetry Book of 2015 for The Verging Cities!

The award ceremony will be held at a luncheon on Friday, February 19, 2016, at the National Association of Chicana & Chicano Studies-Tejas Foco in Houston, TX.

The Verging Cities, by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, has been selected by NBC News' Rigoberto González as one of 9 Great New Books by Latino Authors.