Mexican American poet wins 2022 Ernest Sandeen Prize

SOUTH BEND — Vickie Vértiz has won the 2022 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry.

Her first poetry collection, “Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut,” was published in the Camino del Sol Series at The University of Arizona Press. The collection won a 2018 PEN America literary prize.

Vértiz’s new collection of poems, “Auto/Body,” will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press in February 2023. The poems in this collection are an inexhaustible engine — sometimes a body, sometimes flesh — a sensual exploration of what it means to repair, to remake, to keep going even when rebuilding feels impossible.

Uniting childhood memories of auto body shops with the language of queer identity, the poems investigate desire and selfhood. From odes to drag, to pushing back on the tyranny of patriarchy, to loving too hard and too queer, to growing up working-class in a time of incessant border violence and incarceration, the collection combusts with blood and fuel.

Vértiz is an award-winning Mexican American poet, writer and professor whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

She is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California, Riverside. She now teaches in the Writing Program at UC Santa Barbara.

Named for a longtime professor at Notre Dame and noted poet, the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the English department at Notre Dame in conjunction with Notre Dame Press.

The prizes are awarded to authors who have published at least one volume of poetry.

For more information, visit undpress.nd.edu.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Mexican American poet wins 2022 Ernest Sandee Prize