the present tense

A few days ago I received the fabulous news of being the winner of the Annual Award that the Foundation for Urban Culture in Caracas has been granting for the past 24 years.

This prize celebrates the concurrence of texts of different literary genres in the same contest, and has been awarded to important Venezuelan writers, among them: Ricardo Ramírez Requena, Jacqueline Goldberg, Gustavo Valle, Krina Ber, María Antonieta Flores, Francisco Massiani, Roberto Echeto and Gina Sarraceni.

In addition to the joy that gives me the possibility of publishing again in Venezuela, of connecting again with readers in my country (where I have not lived for more than a decade), I was very proud that this award was given to the first collection of poems I have finished: La balsa malograda (which could be translated into English as The ill-fated raft).

Divided into two parts: “Cuaderno de vuelta” and “Cuaderno de ida”, the poems in this book are my version of the Venezuelan diaspora of the last decade. The ill-fated raft is our common home adrift, the lament of our coming and going from shipwreck to shipwreck.

The jury that awarded my book was composed of Sandra Caula (winner of the contest last year), Gabriela Kizer (amazing Venezuelan poet), and Cristian Álvarez (literature PhD and publications coordinator of Editorial Equinoccio).

Here is a fragment (in Spanish) of the jury’s verdict when the award was announced. https://cultura-urbana.com/xxiv-premio-anual-transgenerico/

And here the translation into English:

We, members of the jury of the XXIV Annual Transgeneric Prize, awarded by the Foundation for Urban Culture, have unanimously decided to give the award to the work La balsa malograda.

Its poetic narrative, in fragments of a fabulous chronicle, brings together images of great force that interweave the personal with the collective, the mythical with the everyday. The marine and terrestrial images, which alternate between the concrete and the symbolic, maintain a constant tension between the desire to return from an exile, perhaps unending, and the impossibility of recovering what has been lost. With an unmistakable voice, the collection of poems transforms the personal experience of displacement – intimate or spatial – into a universal reflection on belonging.

JMS