2019 National Poetry Series Winners

Name: 2019 National Poetry Series Winners
Start: 2020-11-16T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2020-11-17T18:59:59-05:00
Location: On Demand

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Special introduction by Daniel Halpern, founder of HarperCollins imprint Ecco and the National Poetry Series.

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry annually through participating publishers. In addition, the National Poetry Series has partnered with Miami Book Fair to award the Paz Prize in Poetry, which ensures bilingual publication for a book of poems written in Spanish. This conversation features Benjamin Garcia on Thrown in the Throat, in conversation with the judge who selected his manuscript, Kazim Ali, The Voice of Sheila Chandra.

In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.

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Halpern, Daniel

Daniel Halpern is the author of eight collections of poetry, and has received numerous grants and awards (including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the 1993 PEN Publisher Citation). For twenty-five years he edited the literary magazine Antaeus. He is currently Editorial Director of The Ecco Press/HarperCollins.

Benjamin Garcia

Benjamin Garcia is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow, was the 2017 Latinx Scholar at the Frost Place, and was a 2018 CantoMundo Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2018, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. In Thrown in the Throat (Milkweed Editions), his debut book of poetry, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. In the process retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival.

Kazim Ali

Kazim Ali is a poet, editor, and prose writer born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian and Egyptian descent. He has written several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award. His novels include Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth. Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, the poems in The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books) bring sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There’s an honoring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back.

2019 National Poetry Series Winners