Lisbeth White Wins 2022 Perugia Press Prize
EcoTheo contributor Lisbeth White, whose essay “Sanctuary: Rock: Mountain: Home” was published in our Autumn 2021 Social Justice Folio, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Perugia Press Prize for her first book, American Sycamore. The announcement for the prize can be found here. American Sycamore will be released in September 2022.
From the Perugia Press Prize announcement:
American Sycamore is an exploration of racial identity and the natural world, rooted in the mythopoetics of wilderness and ancestry as sources of trauma, grief, wonder, and tremendous resource. In pursuit of understanding the nuances of belonging and displacement in a Black mixed-race feminine body, Lisbeth White travels through mythic, biological, and geological landscapes, attending to the body and its beautiful and terrifying questions. Her journey manifests in a poetic helix of recurring bridges, trees, myths, origins, and awakenings. From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, these poems traverse global terrain while interrogating the dark past/present of America. In American Sycamore, the poet examines the Black diaspora, the spiritual South, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine, inviting the reader into a deep conversation of seeking and recovery.
An excerpt from Lisbeth White’s essay “Sanctuary: Rock: Mountain: Home,” published in “Sanctuary and Shelter,” our Autumn 2021 Social Justice Folio:
“We walked as many deer trails as human hiking trails. Deer trails marked only by a crushed leaf or one bent blade of grass, delicate and subtle, as if walking a mountain was a refined act. As if the tread should reflect such reverence.
We slept without tents on a ridge that bottomed out to a lake, still aquablue from ice. We had passed a wolverine that afternoon but no one seemed worried about that.
The stars were many, so many beyond how we had learned to talk about them, that we didn’t. We stayed quiet and awake much of the night, sleeping bags pressed together beneath a sky glistening as glitter, trying to keep our eyes open.
Trying to capture all the light we could.”
