I’m so pleased and eager to announce that I’ll be this year’s judge for the New England Poetry Club 2019 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. The award goes out to a chapbook published within the last two years.
My chapbook Water Street, from Finishing Line Press, won last year’s Pedrick Prize (alongside co-winner C. Prudence Arceneaux’s Dirt), so I’m looking forward to this chance to give back to the poetry community.
Selections from Water Street are now posted in the 2018 NEPC Prize Winner’s Anthology. Of the collection, judge Krysten Hill said:
What drew me into Naila Moreira’s Water Street was its immersive descriptiveness that never underestimates the power and tension that the natural world can embody. These powerful poems delivered me to all kinds of ecosystems thriving just underneath the surface in all their violent glory. There are times when the natural world collides with human destruction to create a sinister chain reaction. Moreira reminds us of a world where “…planes fall, frogs spawn/against backdrop of rubber, plastic, steel;/a thousand eggs; a thousand tiny bombs./They hatch into a universe of fear.” The speaker exists in nature’s hiding places and out in the open where they are exposed and vulnerable to the vulnerability that they see in nature. At times, these poems suggest a disquieting tone that haunted me throughout the day. At other times, I felt a liberating honesty and was grateful for how it shook me awake. —Krysten Hill
Chapbooks can be submitted via the NEPC submissions guidelines. I’m thrilled to read and explore the poetic work that comes my way for the Pedrick Prize.