The 2022 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation

Congratulations to the winners and honorable mentions for the 2022 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, judged by Daniel Borzutzky.

2022 Winner:
Elisa Wouk Almino's translations of prose poetry by Brazilian writer Ana Cristina Cesar: Everything Is a Letter

Honorable Mentions:
Ryan Greene's translations from Yaxkin Melchy Ramos' book The New World: "A seed from The Green Sun // Una semilla de El sol verde"
Stine Su Yon An's translations of contemporary South Korean poet Yoo Heekyung: Today's Morning Vocabulary

Daniel Borzutzky, on the winner: 
With vivacity and ingenuity, these translations from deep in the archives of Ana Cristina Cesar's genre-blurring poem/letter/drawings present a stirring depiction of how art gets made amid the scraps and ambivalences of daily life with its human and non-human relations. "The mannequin remains inside the mannequin...there's no more outside, inside, beginning, end," writes ACC, and in these words we see a stance towards both aesthetics and survival that reminds us of how real the unreal is, of how powerful a form can be when it marinates in its interrogations of itself, when it allows itself to remain alive, fluid, messy. 


Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, translator, and editor based in Los Angeles. She is the deputy editor of Image, the style and culture magazine of the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally teaches literary translation at UCLA Extension. She is the translator of This House by Ana Martins Marques (Scrambler Books, 2017), and the editor of Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction (Rizzoli, 2020). She is currently translating the Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar and the letters that she sent to Elisa's mother in the late 1970s and early '80s.  

The Gulf Coast Prize in Translation was founded by the Editors in 2014. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in the print edition of Gulf Coast. Honorable mentions receive $250. All entries will be considered for publication as GC Online Exclusives. 

Daniel Borzutzky

Daniel Borzutzky

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator who lives in Chicago. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human won the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.  His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia won the 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.