2019 National Poetry Series Winners

Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puertorican poet, translator and literary critic. They are the author of several books including Caneca de anhelos turbios, intermitente/ intermittent land and while they sleep (under the bed is another country). Their work has appeared in journals such as the Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Apogee, BOAAT, Círculo de Poesía, Cosmonauts Ave, Waxwing, Dreginald, and the Boston Review. Rivera served as the 2018-2019 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. Lo Terciario/The Tertiary (Noemi Press) is a collection of poems by Raquel Salas Rivera written in response to Puerto Rico’s Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Bill. Rivera asks us to reflect on the Puerto Rican debt crisis, urging us to remember the violence and colonialism that plagued the country for decades. It considers the debt crisis from a queer perspective, as Rivera explores what it means to be queer or transgender in this ravaged country.

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.

Michael Torres spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His writing has been featured in POETRY, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Who do we belong to? This is the question Michael Torres ponders in An Incomplete List of Names as he explores the roles that names, hometown, language, and others’ perceptions play on our understanding of ourselves. More than a boyhood ballad or a coming-of-age story, this collection illuminates the artist’s struggle to make sense of the disparate identities others have forced upon him. He calls himself “the Pachuco’s grandson” or REMEK or Michael, depending on the context. He worries about losing his identification card, lest someone mistake his brown skin for evidence of a crime he never committed. He wonders what his students–imprisoned men who remind him of his high school friends and his own brother–make of him. When Torres returns to his hometown he finds that the spray-painted evidence he and his boyhood friends left behind had been washed away. How to collect a list of names that could match the eloquent truths those bubbled letters once secured? Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate of the United States praised Torres for “an uncharted and ‘incomplete,’ ever-flaming matrix of being and becoming a brown man, a person in an unknown America. Incredible, truth-fisted, shattering, groundbreaking.”