Natalie Scenters-Zapico
“I’ve never once planned a poem, to be honest, because it’s so fun to go with it, so fun to have it take you places. And it’s so associative in my mind, too. You use one word and it immediately leads me into another, and I love following that train of thought.”
“In these poems, the border is a powerful metaphor, but it is never merely trope; it is actual, political, damaging.”
“The stakes, in Scenters-Zapico’s poems, are that serious: her astonishing verbal crossings reveal a mind as richly self-divided as any you will find.”
“This work represents social disruption in a way that only the most moving poetry can do… Lima :: Limón is filled with strong poems that disrupt binary structures and exemplify how poetry can move beyond aesthetic representation of tragedy.”
Natalie Scenters-Zapico's most recent book is My Perfect Cognate (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). She is also the author of the widely acclaimed Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award and the Griffin Prize. Her first book, The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award, the NACCS Foco Book Prize, and the Utah Book Award, and was featured in Poets and Writers, LitHub, and the Los Angeles Times. Her latest poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, The New Republic, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Best American Poetry 2024, and more.
Winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), she has held a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018), a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2017), and a CantoMundo Fellowship (2015).
Scenters-Zapico teaches in the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs at the University of South Florida, where she won a USF 2022 Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award (ORAA) and a 2023-2024 McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship. She is Inaugural Director of the Michael Kuperman Memorial Poetry Library at USF.
She currently lives in Tampa with her husband, young son, suegros, and little dog.
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(c) John Markadakis
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