Faculty Biographies

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Assistant Professor

CONTACT

Office: CPR 311
Phone: N/A
Email: nascenterszapico@usf.edu

LINKS

• Website

BIO

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a poet, educator, and activist from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Colorado State University 2015). She is the winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenburg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018), a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2017), and a CantoMundo Fellowship (2015). Her books have been reviewed and featured widely in periodicals like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others. You can read her most recent poems in The Paris Review, The New England Review, and Narrative.

Natalie’s work is concerned with borders, undocumented life in the United States, femicide, and machismo/marianismo. Her most recent work is interested in border surveillance technologies and all women’s right to bodily autonomy.

She currently lives in Tampa, Florida with her husband Dr. José Ángel Maldonado where they both teach at the University of South Florida in the Department of English.

Selected Honors and Awards

Year	Honor or Award
2021	Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize. Yale University, New Haven, CT.
2021	Humanities Institute Summer Research Grant. University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.
2020	Griffin International Poetry Prize Shortlist. Griffin Trust, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
2020	Kingsley Tufts Mid-Career Award Finalist. Claremont University, Claremont, CA.
2017	PEN American/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. PEN America: New York, NY.
2016	Utah Book Award in Poetry. Salt Lake City, UT.
2015	Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Oberlin College: Oberlin, OH.

Fellowships

Year	Fellowship
2018	Poetry Foundation, “Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.”
2017	Lannan Foundation, “Lannan Literary Fellowship.”
2015	CantoMundo Foundation, “CantoMundo Fellowship.”

BooksSelected Publications

• Lima :: Limón. Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.
• The Verging Cities. Fort Collins, Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University (Mountain West Poetry Series), 2015

 Poems

• “Another’s Living Soul,” “Because I am a Good Shot,” and “Drone,” Narrative, forthcoming.
• “A Tiny Nest of Paper,” and “Object Mother,” Southern Indiana Review, forthcoming.
• "Sophia Wants a Baby and So Do I,” The Colorado Review, forthcoming.
• “1,723 Miles Away From Home,” and “The Aeryon R80D Skyraider,” The Yale Review, Vol. 109 Issue 4.
• “Present This Receipt to CBP,” “Agent.” New England Review, Fall 2021 Vol. 42 Issue 3.
• “Small Unmanned Aerial Systems,” “The Lockheed Martin Indago 3,” and “CCTV,” Gulf Coast, Summer/Fall 2021.
• “Fable,” “In Youth,” and “Smolder,” Puerto del Sol, Fall 2021 Vol. 56 Issue 1.
• “Pledge Allegiance.” The Academy of American Poets’s Poem-A-Day, 1 October 2020. Online.
• “The Trick is to Pretend.” The Paris Review, Issue 228, Spring 2019.
• “Paper Cuts.” The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day, 5 July 2019.
• “After Making Red Chile.” Ploughshares, Vol. 45 No. 1, edited by Rigoberto González, Spring 2019.