Writing alum Eduardo Martínez-Leyva '15 has won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary poetry, for his debut collection, Cowboy Park (2024), out with University of Wisconsin Press.
Presented to a first book of significant promise, the award from Claremont Graduate University offers a substantial $10,000 prize to an emerging poet.
"In this deeply felt, erotically charged debut, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva leads readers through a poet’s carefully built interior world in which he braids together tenderness and violence, action and passivity, the unsayable with the sung," reviewed the poet Mark Wunderlich.
The autobiographical poems offer a remix of the iconic cowboy image: a queer Latinx person born and raised in the border town of El Paso. Tenderness and violence coexist in Martínez-Leyva's lyric, which probes the intersections of political violence, familial tragedy, and sexuality.
"My hope is that through my lived experiences, readers can find common ground or, if not, expand their understanding of what it feels like to survive and be resilient in a world that often pressures us to do the opposite," Martinez-Leyva told LoHud.
Born in El Paso, Texas to Mexican immigrants and based in New York, Martinez-Leyva has received fellowships from CantoMundo, The Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lambda Literary Foundation. His work has been published in The Boston Review, Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets 2015, among other publications. Cowboy Park is the winner of the 2024 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press.
