Previous book winners include Michael Chang, Jeremy Paden’s translation of Mario Meléndez, Bruce Bond, E.J. McAdams, Ryan Clark, Rachel Abramowitz, Matthew Guenette, Maggie Queeney, Nicole Callihan, Zoe White, Mag Gabbert, and Jenna Goldsmith

Praise for Jeremy Paden’s full-length poetry translation of Mario Meléndez’s Waiting for Perec / Esperando a Perec:

"In Waiting for Perec every poem begins with the phrase: I saw…, and the objects of that vision range from Death and God to John Lennon and Sinatra, from the Marquis de Sade and Madame Bovary to Cortázar and John Wayne, among many others. What is less clear is who saw: the poet or poetic persona, Heraclitus, God, Christ… In Mario Meléndez's remarkable poems, rendered beautifully in Jeremy Paden's masterful translation, Perec never appears, just as Godot failed to do so 70 years earlier. And that's the point. Life occurs, is seen, while waiting, in the interim. That space, the intersection of living and seeing, of waiting and doing, is the space of poetry." — Anthony L. Geist

“Imaginative freedom is so strong in Mario Meléndez's writing that we glide without even pausing from pure games to enlightening blows, from the freest of associations that delight us to the stabbing pain, from innocent everydayness to the macabre, always on the verge of surrealism but well-anchored in the real world. Shot through with humor and irony, his poetry, nourished by obsessions, by beloved poets, by an obvious love of words, bestows on us at every step a strange beauty and a unique mode of coming into knowledge”.

Piedad Bonnett

“Mario Meléndez's poetry combines a wide imagination with a language full of humor and compassion. Each of his poems tells a clear and piercing story; even death and worms are, in the hands of this writer, subjects we welcome on account of the light they shed on the richness of our lives. I celebrate the work of a Chilean poet who writes with an ever impressive ease and originality”. 

Dave Oliphant

“I have been reading and rereading Waiting for Perec. The poems are excellent, there's no excess or lack. It's essential, from bone to bone, the purest marrow. A poetry whose virtue is the ability to surprise itself and, as it does, it surprises us ver-ti-cally, like the well-remembered Roberto Juarroz would have said. Oh, our unforgettable grandfather, César Vallejo, would have so enjoyed himself had he read your poems! I suggest you send them to the other world by whatever means possible, even if only telepathically. Vallejo will respond, his soul is generous, Vallejo courses through us all”.  

Hernán Lavín Cerda