UGA Press/Review book wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Brandon Som has won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His collection of poems in a book called Tripas was co-published by the University of Georgia Press and the Georgia Review.

From UGA Today...

On Monday, May 6, 2024, Columbia University announced the winners of the Pulitzer Prize across all categories. Tripas by Brandon Som, copublished by The Georgia Review and the University of Georgia Press, was selected as the Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry.

Released in March 2023, the poems in Tripas are built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise.

“Som’s poems refuse to confine themselves or their forms to any one thing,” Stephanie Burt, literary critic, poet and Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University, wrote in her review for the London Review of Books. “All of them enfold and link multiple topics, injustice among them. He writes, as well, to honour people who endured, who made their own way.”

Gerald Maa, Director and Editor of The Georgia Review, was ecstatic about the news. “We’re very excited for Brandon’s triumph. Reading these poems feels like being part of a lively, intimate conversation. I’m thrilled that this award will bring even more readers to this book.”

Lisa Bayer, Director of the University of Georgia Press, expressed her enthusiasm. “The act of literary book publishing—of making public the word—is deeply collaborative and hopeful. We are grateful to have partnered with the extraordinary poet Brandon Som and the brilliant team at The Georgia Review on this remarkable collection.”

About the Imprint:

Georgia Review Books is a collaboration between the University of Georgia Press and its university partner The Georgia Review. Founded at the University of Georgia in 1947 and published there ever since, the Review is one of America’s most highly regarded journals of arts and letters. This imprint publishes original literary works that not only continue conversations happening in the journal but also introduce books from writers new to the Anglophone reading public or emerging within our literary landscape.

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