Winner of Miller Williams Poetry Prize to read at the Winchester Book Gallery

Jose Padua

Winchester, VA — Veteran slam poet Jose Padua, a 10-year resident of Front Royal, Virginia, will read from A Short History of Monsters at the Winchester Book Galley on Saturday, July 6, 2019, at 6:00 PM. Padua’s first full-length book, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by former poet laureate Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize.

In his introduction to the book, published by the University of Arkansas Press, Billy Collins says, “We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua’s consciousness… a smart, sympathetic mind at work.”

Booklist comments, “Padua is a very wry poet who, in his first book, presents stinging and riotous poems, as in the two-stanza ‘Barbie’: ‘I am Barbie / I live in your dollhouse / You change my clothes every day. / If I could get out / of here I would / kill you all.’ These are works that sharpen the mind on the micro, as opposed to the macro of our human experience.”

A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns.

The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself.

Jose’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon, The Weeklings, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. He’s written features and reviews for the NYPress, the Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Times and read his work at the Lollapalooza Festival, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Split This Rock poetry festival, the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, and many other venues.

The reading is free and will be followed by a reception.