05/17/2025
We are thrilled to announce that The Beautiful Relations by Benjamin Gucciardi is the winner of the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky Editors’ Choice Award. Persea will publish this extraordinary collection in Fall 2026.
The editors are also pleased to recognize this year’s runner up, Redwork by Laurie Ann Guerrero.
Benjamin Gucciardi was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His first book, West Portal, (University of Utah Press, 2021), received the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021), winner of the 2020 Quarterly West chapbook contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, On Being’s Poetry Unbound and elsewhere. In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in the bay area through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.
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