Arlington, VA—March 2024
Gival Press is pleased to announce that Rod Carlos Rodriguez of San Antonio has won the Gival Press Poetry Award-2023 for his collection titled A History of Echoes, chosen anonymously by the judge Beverly Burch. The award includes a $1,000.00 cash prize and the collection will be published in book form in October of this year.
Advance Praise
“Rodriguez’ exquisite lyricism sweeps through Puerto Rican history to the present. Each poem in A History of Echoes is a singular gem, but the expanse of this book immerses the reader deep into a mythic realm where music and rhythm take over, carry us on a profoundly sensuous journey. A gourd bursting open releases an ocean, sea turtles emerge from a wound in a man’s back, ships arrive with ‘ugly,/upright animals [who] seemed//as gods, at first,’ men who speak ‘ugly noise’ and have ‘buticaco eyes.’ The horror of Spanish plunderers, visitations by gods to the contemporaries like the poet Julia de Burgos, and images of Puerto Rican freedom fighters seized my imagination and left me with awe for this book.”—Beverly Burch, judge & author of Leave Me a Little Want
Photo by Sabina de Vries.
About the Author
Rod Carlos Rodriguez has an MFA degree in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and is a Lecturer at the University of Texas at San Antonio Writing Program. He is a poet, fiction, and non-fiction writer who has been writing for over 40 years. He has three books of poetry published: the award-winning Exploits of a Sun Poet (Pecan Grove Press, 2003), Lucid Affairs (Sun Arts Press, 2012), and Native Instincts (Human Error Publishing, 2016). His fourth book of poetry, Cantos, Incandescent, has been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press. He is founder/chair of the Sun Poet’s Society, South Texas’s longest running weekly open-mic poetry reading (1995-2022). He has been nominated for the San Antonio Poet Laureate in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. He was poetry editor for Ocotillo Review, a literary journal/periodical and he was the editor of the Texas Poetry Calendar 2023 (Kallisto Gaia Press).
Finalists:
To Maggie, Wherever You’ve Gone
by Christine Andersen of Storrs Mansfield, CT
The Idea of Light
by John Ronan of Gloucester, MA
Patient: Copy
by Gordon Taylor of Toronto, Canada
In Her Image
by Sally Abbott of San Francisco, CA
Long List of Finalists in Alphabetical Order by Title:
I was born out of a 3D printer
by Quraishiyah Durbarry of Mahebourg, Mauritius
Kangaroo Poems
by Marc Jampole of New York, New York
Randomly Racial / Exorbitantly Religious
by Nishi Chawla of Potomac, MD
Ruins
by Janet Joyner of Winston-Salem, NC
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
by Rob Jacques of Bainbridge Island, WA