Jacob Shores-Argüello Named Winner of Inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize

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Jacob Shore-Arguello.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Jacob Shores-Argüello has been named the winner of the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize for his collection, Paraíso. Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet, fiction writer, and translator.

The poems in Paraíso emerge from a mother’s death and follow the narrator as he explores the tools needed to survive his grief. Catholicism, family, good rum — these easy-at-hand things help, but the real medicine happens when the speaker pushes into the rainforest alone. Eschewing the typical, the collection becomes a celebration of hybridity — science fuses with religion, witchcraft joins with technology, and eventually grief transforms into belief.

Aracelis Girmay, the guest judge for the 2017 prize, was struck by the craftsmanship in Shores-Argüello’s poetry. “His poems are chiseled,” Girmay said, “sculptural even, and yet they seem to ring an ethereal ring, like glass under a finger. These are poems filled with the surprise and humility of traversing physical geographies (mountains and jungles), but also the geographies of grief, healing, and memory. I am deeply moved by their vulnerability and unending quest for closeness.”

Shores-Argüello is the author of In the Absence of Clocks and is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the Dzanc Books ILP International Literature Award, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown, and the Amy Clampitt residency in Lenox. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Journal.

Every year the University of Arkansas Press together with CantoMundo will accept submissions for the CantoMundo Poetry Series and award the $1,000 CantoMundo Poetry Prize to a book of poetry by a Latina/o writer.

Since its founding in 2009, CantoMundo, a national organization that cultivates Latina/o poets, has cultivated and supported a community of Latina/o poets and the poetry they create, and the University of Arkansas Press has long been committed to publishing diverse kinds of poetry by a broad range of poets. The series editors are Deborah Paredez and Celeste Gúzman Mendoza, cofounders and codirectors of CantoMundo.

“Since our inception nearly eight years ago, the CantoMundo founders envisioned a publication prize to showcase the work of contemporary U.S.-based Latinx poets,” said Mendoza and Paredez. “The CantoMundo Poetry Series, a partnership between CantoMundo and the University of Arkansas Press, recognizes and promotes Latinx poetry, with its various linguistic, aesthetic, stylistic and cultural traditions. We are excited to launch it with Jacob Shores-Argüello's manuscript.”

Paraíso will be published in Fall 2017.

About the University of Arkansas Press: The University of Arkansas Press was founded in 1980 as the book publishing division of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.