2021 Perugia Press Prize Results
WINNER: THROUGH A RED PLACE by Rebecca Pelky
Rebecca Pelky’s story-in-poems assembles the author’s research into her Native and non-Native heritage in the land now known as Wisconsin. Through the poet’s ancestors—and documented through text and image—this book relates narratives of people who converged on and impacted this space in myriad ways. Written in English and Mohegan, Through a Red Place reshapes itself from page to page, asking what it means to navigate place as both colonizer and colonized. These poems seek the interior and exterior lives of beloved people and places, interacting with archives and visuals to illustrate that what is past continually interrupts and reinscribes itself upon the present. This collection embodies a refusal to go missing despite what’s buried, erased, or built over, much like the ancient mound now covered by an ammunition plant. An inventive collage of geography, history, myth, translation, lineage, erasure, journalism, and photography, Through a Red Place builds a map between distances and lost stories to unearth and honor the past.
Rebecca Pelky is a member of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin and a native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She holds a PhD from the University of Missouri, an MFA from Northern Michigan University, and is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Clarkson University in Upstate New York. Through a Red Place is her second poetry collection; her first, Horizon of the Dog Woman, was published by Saint Julian Press in 2020.
* Through a Red Place will be released in September 2021 *
FINALISTS:
Maureen Ash, Permaculture teri elam, An Observation of Beautiful Forms Lisbeth White, The Asking Pool: A Mythobiography
SEMI-FINALISTS:
Christina Butcher, Hand to Mouth Monique-Adelle Callahan D., Rupture Anaïs Deal-Márquez, I Made You Pozole Regina DiPerna, The Midwestern Book of the Dead Mary Kaiser, Hotbed Zakia Khwaja, Stones Hold Water Joanne Mallari, Waiting, Washing, Folding Katherine Maurer, Living in the End Times Alysse Kathleen McCanna, FishWife Victoria Lynne McCoy, Wet Reckless Leonora Simonovis, Study of the Raft Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Kaan and Her Sisters