2023 Perugia Press Prize Results

WINNER: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

In Carolina Hotchandani’s debut The Book Eaters, the poet’s desire for agency over her life’s narrative is counterbalanced by her awareness that poetry is written precisely when life wrests control from us. This book, conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth. As roles evolve and dissolve, the poet witnesses the decay of language, artifacts, and history, yet these erasures are also generative: they beget poetic creation. The Book Eaters is a study in belonging as well—to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures. Hotchandani’s poems interrogate what it means to be full or empty (of words, of the past, of another human being); they illuminate our inextricability from our creaturehood. Even as they explore unraveling—through the metaphor of insects that devour the very pages we produce—these poems are tightly woven into an exquisitely crafted, cohesive collection.

Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. She holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include fellowships from Tin House Writers’ Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

The Book Eaters will be released in September 2023 *

FINALISTS:

Monique-Adelle Callahan, Rupture
Saba Husain, Elegy for My Tongue
Michelle Whittaker, Spoke the Dark Matter

SEMI-FINALISTS:

Caitlin Dwyer, In the Salt
Emily Jaeger, Slit
B. Fulton Jennes, Small Animals
Bryana Joy, Summer of the Oystercatchers
Abbie Kiefer, Almost Tender
Viola Lee, The Only Home
Lana Marilyn, Holes in the Water
Aria Pahari, Threat Perception
Barbara Schwartz, What Survives Is the Fire
Caroline Shea, Some Nerve
Sunni Wilkinson, Rodeo
Rewa Zeinati, I Had No Desire to Leave This Place

THANK YOU TO EACH WOMAN WHO SUBMITTED HER MANUSCRIPT/S AND TO THE VOLUNTEERS WHO HELPED READ FOR & JUDGE THE CONTEST!