Americón

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

Nico Vela Page's Americón is the 2020 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Renee Gladman.

Nico Vela Page is a documentary poet and filmmaker whose work is rooted in a variety of research practices. She is Chilean-American, trans, non-binary femme, and is living on Narragansett land, in Providence, RI, where she recently got her BA from Brown University. Nico works in the permeable edges of gender, language, and place, often mixing mediums, always dancing their way through. They are learning to garden.