"Magnificent Errors" by Sheryl Luna
The University of Notre Dame Press is proud to announce that Sheryl Luna is the winner of the 2022 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry for her collection of visionary poems in Magnificent Errors. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame, the prize is awarded to authors who have published at least one volume of poetry. With the poems in Magnificent Errors, the author’s third collection, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive.
The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. The book stems from Luna’s personal experiences in transitional housing after being temporarily homeless and explores themes of mental health struggles that often lead to economic insecurity. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of homelessness, marginalization, and living with mental illness and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.
Luna’s first collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, won the inaugural Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize for emerging Latino/a poets (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, Anderson Center, Ragdale Foundation, and Canto Mundo. She received the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award from Sandra Cisneros in 2008. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope, and Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. Learn more about the author by reading her interview here.
Luna has scheduled in-person and virtual events to promote Magnificent Errors:
• February 22, 2022, Book Launch, Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver CO, 6:00pm – 7:00pm MST
• March 2, 2022, Virtual Book Talk with the Creative Writing Department, University of Notre Dame, 7:00pm – 8:30pm EST
• March 23-26, 2022, Virtual Book Talk with poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Mark Doty, AWP Conference & Bookfair
Magnificent Errors will be available from the University of Notre Dame Press on February 1, 2022. We encourage you to buy the book at your local independent bookstore either in person or online. For more information, or for a review copy, contact Kathryn Pitts, pitts.5@nd.edu, 574.631.3267.