CANTOMUNDO POETRY SERIES

The CantoMundo Poetry Series is an annual book award contest that showcases work by US-based Latinx poets across the linguistic, stylistic, and cultural spectrums from which they write. The series is open to all US-based Latinx writers—not just current or former CantoMundo fellows—regardless of citizenship status or previous publication record. The CantoMundo Poetry Series works to broaden the reach of Latinx poetry, as Latinx poets remain underrepresented in both the US and Latin America in spite of their longstanding presence within and influence on these poetic traditions.

Previously in partnership with the University of Arkansas Press, former prize winners include: inaugural 2017 winner Jacob Shores-Argüello for Paraíso; 2018 winner Ángel García for Teeth Never Sleep; 2019 winner Gina Franco for The Accidental; and the 2020 winner Sara Lupita Olivares for Migratory Sound.

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Series editors are Carolina Ebeid and Ángel García. News about the next award is coming soon.

Sara Lupita Olivares’s Migratory Sound, winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, looks back to generational narratives of Mexican American migration, examining linguistic and geographic boundaries as it journeys north along routes of seasonal fieldwork and factory labor. “Whether enacting a bird migration, or the uprooting of people relocating north, or the private movement from sleep to alert vigilance,” series editors Carolina Ebeid and Carmen Giménez Smith observe, “Olivares’s stark poetry concerns the precarious idea of place and its underlying ‘unplace.’ She makes evident how every place bears a relationship with an elsewhere, an over there sometimes situated underneath.”

PAST WINNERS OF THE CANTOMUNDO POETRY SERIES

The inaugural winner, in 2017, was Jacob Shores-Argüello for his collection Paraíso.

The 2018 winner was Ángel García, for his collection Teeth Never Sleep.

The 2019 winner was Gina Franco, for her collection The Accidental.

The 2020 winner was Sara Lupita Olivares for her collection Migratory Sound.