Hub City Press Announces 2025 Deep Line Poetry Series Winner

Hub City Press is pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 Deep Line Poetry Series, Bianca Alyssa Pérez for her manuscript snake breath. The Deep Line Poetry Series aims to champion poets working in the American South, writing about and from BIPOC communities and offers an advance of $3000 and publication by Hub City Press. This series is made possible with funding from the Poetry Foundation. The winner was selected by editor-at-large Jennifer Chang. 

Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She earned her MFA and PhD from the University of Virginia and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of An Authentic Life (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017). On selecting snake breath for Deep Line, Chang says, “In snake breath, a daughter mourns a difficult father and honors the legacies of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the powerful women in her own family. These are poems of radiance and radical transformation, haunted by ghosts recent and ancestral and grounded in the 'dry bark splits under a Texan sun,' where a woman can be a snake then 'glorified guilt hanging from a tree' and then a god. Here is a poet of grand and resplendent feeling, one who dares to enrapt readers in the sensualities of domestic life despite—or, perhaps, because of—the dailyness of grief. snake breath is beautiful because it is fearless and it is a tender majesty because it reaches out to us all.”

Winner Bianca Alyssa Pérez says, “I'm incredibly honored that my work was chosen by Jennifer Chang as the winner of the Deep Line Poetry Prize. Deep gratitude & admiration to the other finalists; I feel lucky to have been read alongside them. Here's to the sad girls that feel like they have to be chingonas/no-cry-big-girls when they really just want to be 8 years old again dancing at the quince with no worries in the world. Here's to my mom, San Juanita. Here's to my dad, Hector. I wouldn't be who I am without you, ghosts and all.” Bianca Alyssa Pérez (she/her/ella) is a poet & educator born and raised in Texas. Her chapbook, Gemini Gospel, was the winner of Host Publication's Chapbook Contest in Spring 2023. Find more chisme & writing at her website: biancaalyssaperez.com.

Hub City Press will publish snake breath in spring 2027.