We had such a great time at @awpwriter in Baltimore! Thank you to everyone who stopped by the Switchback table and attended our 20th anniversary celebration. Huge thank you also to past Gatewood Prize winners and our former editors who read at our reading and hung out with us. We look forward to many more years of sharing the words of emerging women and nonbinary poets!✨
Thank you to everyone who celebrated 20 years with us at AWP! We loved hearing from past Gatewood Prize winners and former Switchback editors at our reading. 🥂✨
And thank you to @collectivespacesmd for the beautiful event space!
Meet the 2026 Gatewood Prize guest judge (and former Gatewood Prize winner herself), Mónica de la Torre!
Mónica de la Torre is the author of seven books of poetry, of which the most recent is Pause the Document. Others include Repetition Nineteen, which centers on experimental translation and The Happy End/All Welcome, a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika. Among her books written in Spanish and published in her native Mexico City are Acúfenos and Taller de Taquimecanografía, written with the eponymous artists’ collective she co-founded. She co-edited the anthologies Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. She teaches poetry and translation at Brooklyn College’s Creative Writing MFA program.
The 2026 Gatewood Prize is open for submissions! We can’t wait to read your work. This year’s judge is a former Gatewood Prize winner, Mónica de la Torre. Learn more at our website (linked in bio).
Allow us to to introduce ourselves…
Alyse Knorr and Kate Partridge have passed the reins for Switchback Books to the four of us and we couldn’t be more honored. We’re thrilled to continue running a press each of us has some connection to, and look forward to the journey ahead. We want to extend a huge thank you to Alyse, Kate, and every editor before us!
Sincerely,
Marina, Mackenzie, Becca, and Rachel
Congratulations to all the finalists for this year’s Gatewood Prize! We read so many great manuscripts and appreciate everyone who submitted. Thank you for sharing your work with us, and huge thanks again to guest judge Ae Hee Lee!
We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 2025 Gatewood Prize, as selected by guest judge Ae Hee Lee, is “Voyage: Happening in an Egg” by Pearl McHugh!
Pearl McHugh is a gardener and florist living in New Orleans. She is a proud Lambda Literary Fellow and graduate of the University of New Orleans MFA program. This is her first book.
Congratulations, Pearl! Thank you to everyone who submitted to the Gatewood Prize—we read so many great manuscripts, and will release the short list soon to celebrate the finalists.
The latest title from Switchback Books, Rachel Jihye Han’s “I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY,” is now available for purchase at switchbackbooks.com. Winner of the 2024 Gatewood Prize, I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY explores and maps liminal experiences—the posthuman, hybridity and diaspora, the afterlife, and the uncertainties of our real and imagined dystopias—through work that pushes genre boundaries and interweaves the primordial and futuristic, documentarian and autobiographical, narrative and musical, and sacred and profane. Through a pentaptych structure, these poems illuminate the pathways we may uncover as we press deeper into the dark—fashioning beings of metal, electricity, and light, only to return home to ourselves, to the softness of the body. Questions which arise are: How do we protect what is sacred to us through this new dark? What do we carry with us through the fires, and how do we carry it so it does not burn? There is alchemy in this process of searching. Perhaps along the way, we may find that paradise was always a myth—but that there is something much stranger and much more hopeful waiting for us on the other side.
