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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Media Contact:
Caroline Bock/wwphpress@gmail.com
WASHINGTON WRITERS’ PUBLISHING HOUSE ANNOUNCES
THE WINNER OF ITS 2025 POETRY IN TRANSLATION PRIZE
December 23, 2025, Washington DC – ZARPAMOS by Guadalupe Ángela, translated by Yael Kiken, is the winner of the 2025 Poetry in Translation Prize. Zarpamos is an anthology collecting the selected work of the prolific Oaxacan poet Guadalupe Ángela for the first time in English. Kiken’s translation will be published on January 26, 2027.
With side-by-side iterations in English and Spanish, this collection follows speakers who engage in interpersonal relationships through musings on nature, who look at small moments—a pencil drawing a line on paper, a mother waiting for the children to fall asleep—for answers to larger, existential questions. Here, Kiken makes expert choices that recreate the beauty and lyric of Ángela’s original language.
Yael Kiken is a professor and poetry translator. She studied literature at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University and has taught writing in many classrooms. Some favorite opportunities include: leading spoken word workshops with DCPS
elementary schoolers, teaching students at DC and Michigan correctional facilities, instructing third grade in Cortes, Honduras, co-leading translation workshops in Oaxaca, Mexico, and teaching with the New England Literature Program and Community Scholars Program. She currently teaches writing at Howard University and lives with her family in Washington, DC.
“I admire the craft in this manuscript—the choices, the act of translating. The poems are carefully rendered and lyrical. The manuscript is complete in its narrative arc and depth,” shared Jona Colson, co-president/poetry editor at WWPH and translator of AGUAS by Miguel Avero, the first work in translation from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, published in 2024.
A sample of ZARPAMOS can be read below:
En el pozo, vive la carpa
no hay espacio ni horizonte
solo caída y oscuridad.
II
La carpa sale a la superficie
y mira la luz,
ciega, vuelve a caer.
III
La carpa flota en su soledad,
un mosquito se le acerca
y ella, aturdida, lo come.
——————-
I
In the well, there lives a carp.
There is no space or horizon,
just depth and darkness.
II
The carp surfaces
and looks at the sunlight,
and blinded, falls once again.
III
The carp floats in her solitude,
a mosquito gets close and,
bewildered, she eats it.
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In 2027, The Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH), will publish three award-winning poetry collections, including this work in translation, as well as an award-winning collection of fiction. This record number of publications is announced in a year that marked WWPH’s 50th anniversary and in which WWPH published its most ambitious anthology to date, AMERICA’S FUTURE: poetry & prose in response to tomorrow, which is edited by Caroline Bock and Jona Colson and features 164 writers in 179 works over 576 pages. The anthology is now available in trade paperback and ebook.
The Washington Writers’ Publishing House is the longest, continuously operating cooperative nonprofit literary press in the United States. More about the Washington Writers’ Publishing House can be found at www.washingtonwriters.org.