Nathan Xavier Osorio won the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Nathan Xavier Osorio is the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for his debut collection. The University of Pittsburgh Press will publish “Querida,” selected for the prize by poet Shara McCallum, as part of the acclaimed Pitt Poetry Series on Sept. 10.

“Memory is a guiding force in Nathan Osorio’s stunning debut,” said McCallum, author of “No Ruined Stone” and this year's judge. “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 and language as well as brotherhood, motherhood and fatherhood in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles, where Osorio was born and raised. The PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, previously won the Poetry Society of America’s 202 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.

“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,” said 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.”