2021 National Poetry Series Winner No’u Revilla

Name: 2021 National Poetry Series Winner No’u Revilla
Start: 2022-11-17T12:00:00-05:00
End: 2022-11-17T13:00:00-05:00
Location: On Demand

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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 No’u Revilla on Ask the Brindled: Poems, speaking with the judge who selected her manuscript, Rick Barot, The Galleons: Poems. In this debut collection, Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo’o, ma’i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red – for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawai’i with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of ’Ōiwi culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates. With a special introduction by Daniel Halpern, founder of HarperCollins imprint Ecco and the National Poetry Series.

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Revilla, Noʻu

Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi poet and educator. She was born and raised on the island of Maui and currently lives on Oʻahu, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her debut collection, Ask the Brindled (Milkweed), was selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. In it, she grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red – for desire, love, and generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair “the way my grandmother – not god – / the way my grandmother intended.” Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes about sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, and civic. Through the formal dynamism and the material of ʻŌiwi culture and mythos, this living text both condemns and creates. Ask the Brindled is a song from a throat that refuses to be silenced. It is a testament to queer Indigenous women who carry baskets of names and stories, “still sacred.” It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives imposed upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.

Barot, Rick

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of the collection The Galleons (Milkweed Editions) and three previous volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall; Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 GrubStreet National Book Prize; and Chord. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker, and he is the poetry editor for the New England Review. He will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 as the National Poetry Series moderator for ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator No’u Revilla, author of Ask the Brindled: Poems (Milkweed Editions).

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.

2021 National Poetry Series Winner No’u Revilla