Winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize, selected by Patricia Smith.

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"Jessica Guzman’s blazingly beautiful poems illuminate and record nature’s resilience and suffering as well as our own. In this marvelous first collection, 'like algae on a river // everything gradual we notice // at once: the service dog’s bark, / the fire flower’s sliver burst & contrails / conspiring against dusk.' Spirits of all kinds take us by storm; we emerge both cleansed and ravished, hungering for more."—Angela Ball

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"Adelante is unerringly fresh and restless, a treasure of deftly-honed narratives that manage to be both unleashed and enviably controlled. The poet galvanizes the often staid stories that surround and numb us--in these pages, an alternately tender and ferocious lyricism is just barely contained. That lyricism bolsters the meticulous crafting that can't help but culminate in a sparkling and utterly original collection." —Patricia Smith

 

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Jessica Guzman's work appears in Shenandoah, jubilat, The Greensboro Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and elsewhere. Her honors include American Literary Review’s 2017 Poetry Award and Harpur Palate's 2017 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry, as well as scholarships from the Tin House Winter Workshop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop, and the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers and will be Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College beginning Fall 2019.