Natalie Scenters-Zapico Keynote Reading, Merced Litfest

This year’s Merced Litfest will feature two keynote events with award-winning fronteriza poet, Natalie Scenters-Zapico.  Both events are free and open to the public:

Poetry Workshop

1:00-2:15pm, Ruiz Admin Bldg. 345, UC Merced Campus

Keynote Reading & Address

7:00pm, Merced Multicultural Center, 645 W. Main St.

About Our Keynote Speaker

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. She is the author of three collections of poetry, My Perfect Cognate (Copper Canyon Press September), Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015).

Winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), Natalie 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). Her first book, The Verging Cities, won the PEN/America Joyce Osterweil Award (2016), the GLCA New Writer’s Award (2016), and the Utah Book Award (2016). Her second book, Lima :: Limón, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize (2020) and shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2020). Her books have been reviewed widely in publications like The New Yorker, NPR, The Washington Post, and Publisher’s Weekly.

She 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.