The Huizache Literary Initiative is pleased to announce that María Esquinca is the recipient of the 2024 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Named after the late Chicano poet from Fresno, the prize honors Montoya’s enduring literary legacy. The new iteration of the prize was re-established at the University of California, Davis in collaboration with the New Oeste Series at the University of Nevada Press and continues to support the publication of a first book by a Latinx poet residing in the United States.

This year’s prize was judged by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who was assisted by first readers Anthony Cody, Hermelinda Hernandez, and Josiah Luis Alderete.

Juan Felipe Herrera writes: “María Esquinca cuts us loose—here we speak with each poem, we scream and howl, wounded. We taste every stat of migrant’s death, and survival, and offer God chants in Pocha riffs. Our tongue burns into many songs, dawns, and border scars under neon moons. Each line whips jagged and tosses us into today’s realities of struggle and brave new minds of transformation. This is the Time to cross the lines of María Esquinca’s fiery voice and onto ours.”

Born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, María Esquinca grew up in El Paso, Texas. She now lives in Oakland, CA where she is a producer for The Bay podcast, a production of KQED. She was previously a New York Women’s Foundation IGNITE Fellow with Latino USA and a 2020 Report for America Corps Member at Radio Bilingüe. María graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso and received her MFA from the University of Miami. She also graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her poetry has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Waxwing, The Florida Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cream City Review, and others. In 2018, she won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets judged by Victoria Chang, and in 2024 she won the South Carolina Review Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Adroit Journal and ANMLY. 

María Esquinca writes how being a fronteriza informed her poetics: “I learned very early on that borders or limits are inorganic, and artificially placed on people. That freedom enters my poetry. To me, poetry is the purest form of expression precisely because it has no boundaries. It has no limits or walls.”

For more from María, please check out Huizache’s interview with her here.

As winner, María will receive $1000 from the Huizache Literary Initiative and a contract from the University of Nevada Press as part of its New Oeste Series. Upon publication of the winning book, the Huizache Literary Initiative will extend an invitation to María to give a reading at UC Davis. In addition, María will be invited to present her poetry by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, who first established the prize in 2004.

Juan Felipe Herrera also designated two finalist manuscripts as runners-up, Mae Ramirez’s “Moonward Delirium” and Katarina Xóchitl Vargas’s “The Half That Runs.” Paco Marquez received an honorable mention for his manuscript “In the Peripheral Background.”

Mae Ramirez is a Chicana poet, mother, and librarian from Los Angeles, CA. She is a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award, and was a semifinalist in the 2022 Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry. In 2021 she was a parent writer-in-residence at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado where she composed the poem “emparadising” as a multimedia project.

Katarina Xóchitl Vargas was raised in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Her poems have appeared in Somos en escrito, Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal, The Acentos Review, Penumbra, Barrio Panther, Fragmented Voices, La Raíz Magazine, and Xinachtli Journal. Xóchitl is the first-place recipient of the Mulberry Literary Fresh Voices Award and was a Yellow Arrow Vignette 2023 Best of the Net nominee.

Based in New York City, Paco Marquez is the author of the chapbook Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in Fence, The Literary Review, Apogee, Philosophy and Global Affairs and Huizache, among others. His work has been supported by The Center for Book Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York University. Paco has served as poetry editor at Washington Square and OccuPoetry, and currently at 128 Lit.