Natalie Scenters-Zapico
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2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow &
winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry from PEN America! 
The U.S.-Mexico border and the strained but wondrous connection between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez is the energetic and sometimes tragic setting of Scenters-Zapico’s debut collection of poems. Hers is an insider’s view behind the headlines: the troubled border is also a place teeming with life, thriving with culture and hope. This book is a hard-won love song to one of America’s most misunderstood landscapes.
— Rigoberto González, “Summer Reads: Top 9 Latino Authors” nbcnews.com |
Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S.A., and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México.
Her first book The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015) won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award, NACCS Foco Book Prize, Utah Book Award, and was featured in Poets and Writers, LitHub, and the Los Angeles Times. Lima :: Limón, her second collection, is forthcoming (Copper Canyon Press April 2019). Her poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines including Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. Currently, she holds fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and CantoMundo. She is a Professor of Literature at Bennington College and a recipient of the 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Twitter: @nascenters 
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Scenters-Zapico recognizes...that text is an inadequate form of resurrection. Yet she must try. ‘Some say, you have no right to talk about the dead. / So I talk of them as living, their bodies standing in the street’s bend,’ she writes. The poet’s words, like flint and tinder, ignite the silence. — Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves: Poems (W. W. Norton) |