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Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. Her first collection, The Verging Cities (2015), won the PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award, GLCA’s New Writers Award, NACCS Foco Book Prize, and Utah Book Award. Lima :: Limón, her second collection, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her third collection, My Perfect Cognate, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in September, 2025. Winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), Scenters-Zapico has held a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018), a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2017), and a CantoMundo Fellowship (2015). Her poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines, including The Paris Review, Best American Poetry 2015POETRYTin HouseKenyon Review, Colorado Review, and more. She teaches in the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs at the University of South Florida, where she won a USF 2022 Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award and a 2023-2024 McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship.

Lima :: Limón 2020 Shortlist

Judges’ Citation

There is a driving, deliberate, righteous indignation to Lima :: Limón, a force that that will unsettle many readers though it is tempered with a mature and forgiving undersong of empathy and love.

There is a driving, deliberate, righteous indignation to Lima :: Limón, a force that that will unsettle many readers though it is tempered with a mature and forgiving undersong of empathy and love. Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza, a frontier dweller, a woman shaped by the contending cultures of Mexico and the USA. Her unflinching gaze is turned on machismo and marianismo, and the quotidian reality of community in crisis, in an elegant poetry that speaks through masks both sacred and profane. The shadow of femicide is never far, but the poet finds a redemptive magic in the voices of the mutilated, in the traditions of ancestors, in the salvific powers of language, in poems pushed to the very edge of what can be said.