2024 Perugia Press Prize Results
WINNER: Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms
by Joan Kwon Glass
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is part lamentation and part hymn—an illumination of diasporic hungers, hauntings, absence, and resilience. With echoes of the Hungry Ghosts in Korean Buddhism running through the text, Joan Kwon Glass’s collection travels from the early twentieth-century Japanese occupation of Korea to the landscapes of 1980s suburban Detroit, from Jeju Island’s caves and the DMZ to Connecticut’s shoreline, and from the winter Olympics in Pyeongchang to the pews of midwestern churches. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and “postcolonialism” through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. These poems ask urgent questions: What does it mean to be a mixed-race survivor of generational traumas in a world that often insists on binaries and singular narratives? What role does “hunger” play in navigating life in the diaspora? And, ultimately, what is required to raise an American daughter while forging a path forward?
Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean diasporic author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022). Joan’s poems have been featured in Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Rattle, Asian American Writers’ Workshop (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is a public school educator where she lives in coastal Connecticut, and a writing teacher at writing centers throughout the country.
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms will be released in September 2024
FINALISTS:
Diana Cao, Will I Return to Earth and Other Ordinary Troubles Tin Fogdall, Single Wire Earth Return Lena Zycinsky, Bela
SEMI-FINALISTS:
Anaïs Deal-Márquez, Ofrenda Tara Elliott, Whorl Lynne Ellis, Swimming Parallel to the Shore Molly Ortiz Horne, Whether the Ocean Alice Liang, Beforelife Kwoya Fagin Maples, Not Your Mami Wata Katherine Maurer, Living in the End Times Stephanie Niu, I Would Define the Sun Wendy L. Silva, These Hands en la Tierra Preeti Vangani, Ministry of Less Anne Yarbrough, Scrap, Feather, Bone Rewa Zeinati, I Had No Desire to Leave This Place