Description: Winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets
Brief description: Michelle Peñaloza is the author of All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems, winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize and two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes. Some of her honors include the Frederick Bock Prize from the Poetry Foundation and grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Community Foundation of Mendocino County, Upstate Creative Corps, 4Culture, Artist Trust, Literary Arts, and PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists). The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Covelo, California.
Review Quotes: "Navigating humor and sorrow--and never neglecting the startling and subversive joy that can be found at their intersection--Michelle Peñaloza uses music and elegantly constructed moments of surprise to guide her reader with a seemingly effortless yet brilliantly deliberate hand. Transposing the mythologies and historical artifacts of an often buried Philippine history and the complex diasporic self-vision of a post-colonial Pinay daughter, Peñaloza's All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems is a sure-footed and confident second collection that establishes this poet's vision as distinct and unforgettable. These poems illuminate the expansive and specific perspective of a multilingual and multicultural speaker with playful precision and sophistication, utilizing modes and meanings that renew the power of storytelling. Here is an unapologetic voice, one that is not afraid to take up necessary space and to claim her belonging in the world, a voice that rings as clearly as a fiercely struck bell."--Tarfia Faizullah, Keetje Kuipers, and Barbara Jane Reyes "Academy of American Poets"