Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes for over a dozen years now. Whether it’s a public health emergency or a political crisis, current events continue to make our mission feel increasingly urgent.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes from many disciplines of investigation. The 12 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They are historians and journalists, economists and philosophers. Previous winners have studied a single location (whether that’s Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the Jim Crow era or an Eastern European border town in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust) as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes chief executive officer Leticia Rhi Buckley, Texas Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan, former California governor Gray Davis, The Sum of Us author and 2022 Zócalo Book Prize winner Heather McGhee, Goldhirsh Foundation president Tara Roth, USC professor of American studies & ethnicity and history George J. Sanchez, and Zócalo trustee and Boeing engineer Reza Zaidi.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and speak at a public program, including an award ceremony, where they will deliver a lecture based on their work, and participate in an interview, in Los Angeles in spring 2023. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit this year is October 28, 2022 at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Our past winners are:

• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Explorations of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In conjunction with our annual book prize, we honor the writer of a poem that best evokes a connection to place. In 2012, Jody Zordrager won our inaugural prize for “Coming Back, It Comes Back,” a poem about returning home to Massachusetts; our 2013 prize went to Jia-Rui Cook—prior to her joining the Zócalo staff as editor—for “Fault,” a poem about the shifting ground on which Southern Californians live. Last year’s prize went to Amy Glynn for “Shoreline,” about a place where we can sit back and watch the tide roll out and come in.

This year, 350 poets submitted about 700 poems to our contest. They brought us to all sorts of places: from the Bronx and Finland to what we imagine heaven is like.

Ultimately, Zócalo poetry editor Stephanie Brown and the Zócalo editorial staff chose to honor a poem about a place here in California. We’re delighted to award the $500 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize to Gillian Wegener, who works on teacher training and curriculum development for the Oakdale Joint Unified School District and serves as the poet laureate of Modesto, Calif. Her winning poem about a small-town diner evokes the intimacy of its staff and regulars, and accepts the inevitability of change:

The Old Mill Café

Everyone knew where to sit.
Everyone knew what time the men from the dairy plant came in after the night shift.
Everyone knew when the all-night drunks would come looking for breakfast.
Everyone knew when Sandy’s girl ran away and why.
Everyone knew the size of the pancakes.
Everyone knew the windmill might really work, but then again, who could be sure.
Everyone knew when the junior college let out for summer.
Everyone knew when the talk was that the highway would be decommissioned.
Everyone knew when the hometown boy made good.
Everyone knew when the waitress was home sick and that she wasn’t sick at all.
Everyone knew and everyone commented when something wasn’t right.
Some folks commented with words and more words and some just nodded
and some didn’t nod.
Everyone knew that team didn’t deserve to win that championship game.
Everyone knew the goddamned hippies weren’t welcome.
Everyone knew the smell of fresh coffee and the little clanks of the creamer lids.
Everyone left that stool empty for a long time after Charlie passed.
Everyone clutched their coffee cups when the train passed through—could have
touched the train as it squeezed by—the truth then, but not now.
Everyone heard about the accident and then everyone knew or thought they knew.
Everyone knew wind from the west meant a little rain.
No one knew what happened to that kid who used to bus tables.
Everyone knew when the price of almonds just about dropped through the floor.
Everyone knew the overpass was coming and that the Old Mill would be razed.
Everyone knew the café would reopen way down the street and no one was happy
about it.
Everyone knew they would keep going to the new place, which they did
even though it wasn’t the same—eggs tasted different, couldn’t put a finger on it.
Everyone knew that things don’t stay the same and there’s no use in whining about
any of it.

We spoke on the phone to the winner, who wrote a piece for Zócalo last year about Modesto’s poetry scene—to tell her the good news and ask her some questions:

Q. Was the “The Old Mill Café” inspired by an actual café—and, if so, where is it?

A. The Old Mill Café is in downtown Modesto. It had a certain kind of mystique. I actually never went inside—but I used to go past it all time. It was on the Old Highway 99.

When I wrote the poem, I was imagining its history over the course of time—how the same people went there day after day, year after year. It was close to a dairy, so I imagined shift workers going there—people who’ve been at the heart of Modesto as a town over the years.

[In 2001], the city built an overpass and knocked down the old restaurant. The Old Mill was moved down street and it doesn’t have a windmill anymore. It’s a regular old diner now, but the same people still go: farmers, ranchers, and the occasional person passing through.

Q. What’s been especially rewarding about being the poet laureate of Modesto?

A. So many community groups have asked me to write poems for their events. No one needs to include a poem in an event, but people feel that a poem gives a sense of gravity to a situation. I’ve been honored to meet that need.

The most challenging poem I’ve written was for the Community Hospice, for the dedication of the Children’s Memorial Garden. I was writing for families who’ve lost a child, so I wanted to honor their experience without assuming that I knew what they were feeling. Having that kind of trust from them was an honor. It was challenging to write and also meaningful, hopefully.

Q. What do you do when you’re not writing poetry?

A. I taught 8th grade English for 22 years. I’m out of the classroom now and working on curriculum and training teachers.

Q. What subject do you find yourself returning to?

A. Sense of place. I moved around a lot growing up and didn’t have a home place. I moved to Modesto and got a teaching job. At first, I wanted to teach and then move somewhere more exciting. Then this became my home, almost in spite of myself. I’m fascinated by how home gets created around us, even when we’re not looking for it.

Q. Which English-language poet do you find especially inspiring?

A. Lorine Niedecker. She has an amazing sense of place in her work, and an amazing sense of history. She’s my go-to poet when I’m stuck, when I feel like I’m caught in little bit of a rut and need to go in a new direction. Sometimes reading her work generates ideas that have nothing to do with what’s in her poems. It’s always a pleasure to read her work and see what happens.

The post Announcing Zócalo’s Fourth Annual Poetry Prize Winner appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.