Last week, the Poetry Society of America announced that alumnus Nathan Xavier Osorio '16 won a 2020 30 & Under Chapbook Fellowship.
Osorio's work, The Last Town Before the Mojave, was selected for the award by poet Oliver de la Paz. Winners of the fellowship receive a monetary prize of $1000 and publication of their chapbook.
The Last Town Before the Mojave had previously been selected by Evie Shockley as a finalist for the 2019 30 & Under Chapbook Prize, and as a finalist for the 2016 Atlas Review Chapbook Contest.
Osorio is the second Poetry alumnus in a row to be awarded the 30 & Under Chapbook Fellowship. Alumna Isabella DeSendi '17 won the award in 2019 and the Poetry Society of America recently announced that her winning chapbook, Through the New Body, is available for pre-order.
Nathan Xavier Osorio is the son of a Mexican grocer and Nicaraguan nurse. His work has appeared in BOMB, The Grief Diaries, Boston Review's Poems for Political Disaster, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews have appeared in Columbia Journal, Publisher's Weekly, UC Santa Cruz's The Humanities Institute, and Letras Latinas' La Bloga. He was selected as a semi-finalist for 92Y's 2019 Discovery Poetry Contest and is currently a PhD student in Literature and Creative/Critical Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
