2025 Lightscatter Press Prize awarded to Sagirah Shahid, for SPIRIT: An African American Muslim Lyric
Heid E. Erdrich (author of Little Big Bully), the prize judge, says: "When I imagine this manuscript between covers, I imagine it humming gently because of all the stored momentum in each poem - huge forces that will rush the reader when the pages are cracked open. Maybe there should be a warning label because this is a charged collection, full of the power of community on the move filtered through the solitary body standing for others, for self, for history."
SPIRIT: An African American Muslim Lyric will be published in the spring of 2027. Congratulations to Sagirah Shahid!
Sagirah Shahid is an African American Muslim poet and performance artist from Minneapolis, Mni Sóta Makóče. Her silk-tongued verse and conceptual art creates lasting experiences for in-person audiences. Sagirah’s conceptual art focuses on curating participatory community spaces that offer healing, affirmation, and resistance against oppressive ideologies. In 2015 Sagirah received a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Award in poetry, a Minnesota Center for Book Arts Mentorship award in 2016, and received a performance arts and storytelling fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance in 2018. In 2020, Sagirah was one of 23 artists selected by Muslim Advocates and the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design to be featured in the American Muslim Futures virtual exhibit. Sagirah is a member of the Mizna writing collective and is a former poetry editor of Overtly Lit journal. She has opened for the Minnesota Orchestra, Canadian pop duo Faarrow, and has danced alongside the Body Watani dance project.
Winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, chosen by judge Yesenia Montilla: "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. It forces us to listen to the dying patriarchy in our songs—how the music is transformed through our body into something new and achingly beautiful."
This book will be published in a bilingual edition (English & Spanish), accompanied by a sixteen track rap album featuring the author. Some of the poems will be accessible as audio from the book.
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."
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.”
2020 Lightscatter Press Prize winner available in the shop
the book and|the book plus
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.
