Photo Credit: Corrin Rausch
Willy Palomo's MERCURY IN REGGAETÓN chosen by Yesenia Montilla for the Lightscatter Press Prize.
In her citation, Montilla observes that "This poet makes of its speaker a revolution with poems like: 'Desktop Graffiti,' 'Pa’ Mis Brujas' and 'For Those Who Have Sexuality With The Wind, The Flowers, The Garden!' It coaxes the spells of Haryette Mullen, Ada Limón and Walter Mercado, becoming profoundly punk and counterculture while invoking its own sense of pop."
Willy Palomo (he/they/she) is the son of two refugees from El Salvador. In 2023, he released Enter Da BoomBow, an independent rap and reggaeton album, and Wake the Others (Editorial Kalina/Glass Spider Publishing, 2023), a winner of a Foreword Prize in Poetry. In November 2024, his Spanish-to-English translation of Tres Tercas Trincheras by Marielos Olivo was published in Europe by FormArti. A veteran of the Salt Lake City poetry slam scene, his fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and songs can be found across print and web pages, including the Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and more. He has performed at or keynoted in 160+ public engagements since 2011, including the SUU Pride Film Festival, el Festival Internacional de Poesia Amada Libertad, and many more. Learn more at www.palomopoemas.com.
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Yesenia Montilla also made special note of Edward Gunawan's manuscript Love for Speakers of Other Languages, as a runner-up. MERCURY IN REGGAETÓN will be published in the the spring of 2026.
Winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, chosen by judge Eduardo Corral: "In this mesmerizing book, the ‘rich vanishing seasons’ of life are rendered beautifully. Each poem about family, each about travel, each poem about love is fluid and precise and memorable. Memory, here, is the ‘strongest /
of the senses’ and its strength is amplified by a deft shaping of the line and a startling imagination rippling in the phrasing, in the imagery."
15% discount for preorders available
till publication date, May 1, 2025!
Lightscatter Press Prize winner
EVENINGFUL by Jennifer Whalen
From judge Rick Barot's citation:
"Eveningful is about elation and sorrow and the way they can happen almost at the same time, together. The poems are about an avid delight, yes: “Like sleeping / in someone’s favorite sweater, waking up / with its fine threads in my mouth.” And also yes: “Sometimes the rain / has to start, then stop. Your life will be full / of something; that will have to be enough.”
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2020 Lightscatter Press Prize winner available in the shop
the book and|the book plus
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Lightscatter Press's books trigger multiple acts and sites of reading, a model that we articulate as the book and, or the book plus: the book launches both its textual self as well as multimedia artifacts and experiences that expand the worlds in which the reader can encounter the text.
