Sara Lupita Olivares Is the 2019 Winner of the CantoMundo Poetry Prize

Sara Lupita Olivares, a doctoral student at Western Michigan University, has been named the winner of the annual CantoMundo Poetry Prize. Every year the University of Arkansas Press, together with CantoMundo, an American literary organization supporting Latinx poets and poetry, awards the CantoMundo Poetry Prize to a book of poetry, written in English by a Latinx writer.

Olivares is being honored for her collection Migratory Sound, which will be published by the University of Arkansas Press in the fall of 2020. Olivares will also receive a cash prize.

The judges stated that “the collection turns both to nature and the generational narratives of immigration to illustrate how idyllic settings are at times posed against reminders of the imperfections that exist beyond these settings — the paper mills, dehorned cattle, and featherless sparrows. These contrasts are used to redefine the idyllic for marginalized voices.”

Olivares is the author of the chapbook Field Things, and her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, Denver Quarterly and Apogee.