WINNER »
2020
Elisa Gonzalez
poetry
Elisa M. Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University M.F.A. program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour (FSG), was published in September 2023.
Her debut novel, The Awakenings, and her first nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth, are also forthcoming from FSG.
Excerpt from “Failed Essay on Privilege,” The New Yorker, November 4, 2019.
“I came from something popularly known as “nothing”
and in the coming I got a lot.
My parents didn’t speak money, didn’t speak college.
Still—I went to Yale.
For a while I tried to condemn.
I wrote Let me introduce you to evil.
Still, I was a guest there, I made myself at home.”
Other poems by Elisa Gonzalez:
“In Quarantine, I Reflect on the Death of Ophelia,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2020.
“2008,” Epiphany, Spring/Summer 2018.