We are proud to announce that Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez has been named a finalist for the 2021 Firecracker Award for Poetry! The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) announced the finalists for this year's Firecracker Awards on their website this morning, May 10, 2021.

Deborah Paredez's Year of the Dog is a Blessing the Boats Selection that tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War. The title refers to the year 1970—the Year of the Metal Dog in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation.

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic whose writing explores the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. She is the author of the poetry collections Year of the Dog (BOA Editions, 2020), This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002), and of the critical study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009). Her writing has appeared in NPR, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Poetry, Poet Lore, and the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (Norton 2018). Her honors include an Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook. She lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

The CLMP Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature are given annually to celebrate books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide. Prizes are awarded in the categories of Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Magazine/General Excellence, and Magazine/Best Debut.

The 2021 Firecracker Awards winners will be announced at a virtual awards ceremony hosted by The Center for Fiction on June 23, 2021, at 7PM ET. Details about the ceremony and a full list of finalists can be found at CLMP.org.

Congratulations, Deborah!