About
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). Her third book is forthcoming Fall 2025 from Copper Canyon Press.
Winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), she has held 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.
Natalie’s latest poems from her forthcoming third book have been published or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Georgia 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 is Director of the Michael Kuperman Memorial Poetry Library at USF.
Natalie currently lives in Tampa with her husband, young son, suegros, and little dog.