Felicia Zamora is a poet, educator, and editor currently living in Ohio. She is the author of six books of poetry including Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, April 2022) I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize released from the University of Iowa Press in April 2021, Body of Render, winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press (2020), Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions, 2018), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press, 2018), and Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA, Moth Magazine, and Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard, authored two chapbooks, won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize, the 2019 Wabash Prize for Poetry and the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and was the 2017 Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO. Her poems and essays are found or forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, Boston Review online, Georgia Review, Guernica, Literary Hub, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and is the associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Project Description: Zamora plans to continue work on a new poetry manuscript that builds from archival research at the University of Texas Austin in the Benson Latin American Collection—Anzaldúa Collection— as well as going through transcripts of the new conversation series: Poetry as Radicalization & Liberation for BIPOC & Marginalized People that she created and hosted in Summer 2021 and Spring 2022. The poems meditate on borders (linguistic, physical, familial, society, liminal, and psychological), racial trauma, growing up Mexican in poverty in the US, childhood violence, estrangement to inherited culture and language, the political as private, and the instinct to retreat to the body as a space of understanding. Poems dialogue with activists, scholars, and poets, throughout history to express the entanglement of social and environmental justice. These poems constellate in radical imagination— to see art as activism, to disinter public and private memory, and create a futurity for BIPOC and marginalized people.
Residency: 2022 Next Book