Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Assistant Professor

CONTACT

Office: CPR 311
Phone: N/A
Email

• Curriculum Vitae
• Website

BIO

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. She is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Colorado State University 2015). She won Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018), a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2017), and a CantoMundo Fellowship (2015). 

Her first book, The Verging Cities, won the PEN/America Joyce Osterweil Award (2016), the GLCA New Writer's Award (2016), and the Utah Book Award (2016). Her second book, Lima :: Limón, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize (2020) and shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2020). Her books have been reviewed widely in publications like The New Yorker, NPR, The Washington Post, and Publisher's Weekly, among others. 

Natalie has published poems in Ploughshares, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Kenyon Review, among others. Poems from her third book-in-progress have been published in The Paris Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Narrative, and more.

She teaches in the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs at the University of South Florida, where she won a USF 2022 Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award (ORAA) and a 2023-2024 McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship. She currently serves as steward for the Michael Kuperman Memorial Poetry Library. 

Natalie lives in Tampa with her husband, young son, suegros, and little dog.

SELECTED HONORS AND AWARDS

Year	Honor or Award
2022	Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award (ORAA). University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.
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
2023-2024	McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship. McKnight Foundation, Tampa, FL.
2018	Poetry Foundation, “Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.”
2017	Lannan Foundation, “Lannan Literary Fellowship.”
2015	CantoMundo Foundation, “CantoMundo Fellowship.”

Selected 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.

Areas of Specialty

Creative Writing: contemporary American poetry and poetics, Latinx/Hispanic poetry and poetics, multilingual/code-switch writing, poetry of place, documentary poetics, and book arts.