Nathan Xavier Osorio of Los Angeles, California, is the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for his collection Querida. Osorio’s debut collection was selected by poet Shara McCallum. The University of Pittsburgh Press will publish Querida as part of the acclaimed Pitt Poetry Series on September 10, 2024.

“Memory is a guiding force in Nathan Osorio’s stunning debut, Querida,” states Shara McCallum. “From the opening, single-sentence tour-de-force of a poem to sonnet-sequences throughout, Osorio’s formal agility and singular voice takes hold of our attention and never lets it go.”

Querida is a place-based lyrical meditation on the author’s immigrant parents, their collective memory, language, and brother/mother/fatherhood in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional reflections, imagistic portraits of people and places, and decolonial poetic rituals—braided with a crown of sonnets—a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism.

“I’m honored and overjoyed that my debut collection of poems will be joining the Pitt Poetry Series and previous Starrett Prize winners that have inspired my writing,” states Osorio. “Poets like Wanda Coleman, Larry Levis, Ross Gay, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Daniel Borzutzky—and the list could go on—taught me how to use poetry to rebuild landscapes in language, how to gaze deep into the well of the things that haunt us the most. I’m especially grateful that my collection was selected by Shara McCallum, whose own lyrical investigations into the mythologies of familial memory, the legacies of migration, and the liminal spaces between languages have guided my work since reading her stunning collection Madwoman.”

Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, The Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, he is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative/Critical Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.