Writing alum Nathan Xavier Osorio '16 has been named the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for his collection Querida. This collection, which will be Osorio’s debut, was selected by poet Shara McCallum, and will be published by The University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the acclaimed Pitt Poetry Series on September 10, 2024.
“Memory is a guiding force in Nathan Osorio’s stunning debut, Querida,” said Shara McCallum. “From the opening, single-sentence tour-de-force of a poem to sonnet-sequences throughout, Osorio’s formal agility and singular voice takes hold of our attention and never lets it go.”
Osorio’s lyrical collection laces together different manners of recollections, from the introspective to the reflective, from personal to portraiture, in a moving rumination on the poet’s immigrant parents. With a chorus of voices and a garland of sonnets, Querida weaves its way through a knotty legacy of migration, colonialism, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism. The collection also serves as an ode to the place, the language, and the family that made Osorio.
“I’m honored and overjoyed that my debut collection of poems will be joining the Pitt Poetry Series and previous Starrett Prize winners that have inspired my writing,” Osorio said. “Poets like Wanda Coleman, Larry Levis, Ross Gay, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Daniel Borzutzky—and the list could go on—taught me how to use poetry to rebuild landscapes in language, how to gaze deep into the well of the things that haunt us the most. I’m especially grateful that my collection was selected by Shara McCallum, whose own lyrical investigations into the mythologies of familial memory, the legacies of migration, and the liminal spaces between languages have guided my work since reading her stunning collection Madwoman.”
Nathan Xavier Osorio is an educator, translator, and poet. His chapbook, The Last Town Before the Mojave, was selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, The Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. Osorio is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Critical/Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
