White Pine Press is pleased to announce that Kyoko Uchida has been awarded the thirty-second Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript The First Foreign Language I Learned was My Name. Selected by final judge Wyn Cooper, the book will be published in the fall of 2027. Ms Uchida also receives a cash prize of one thousand dollars. Runner-ups were Josh Luckenbach’s If We So Choose and Patty Crane’s Blueprint. The other finalists included Michael Moos, VP Loggins, Partridge Boswell, Carolyn Wright, Paul Christiansen and Danielle Hanson.

 

The Judge, Wyn Cooper says of The First Foreign Language I Learned was My Name: 

 

“The poems in Kyoko Uchida’s The First Foreign Language I Learned Was My Name reach across continents and decades to explore identity, family, and the generational clash of cultures. The book opens with a prose poem sequence that’s startling in both its emotional power and its lyricism, its search for a language that can fully describe the feeling of not belonging. To say that Uchida has found that language is an understatement; she has practically invented it.” 

 

Kyoko Uchida is the author of the poetry collections Elsewhere (Texas Tech University Press, 2012) as well as two short story collections, Bone Picking (Mad Creek Press, forthcoming in fall 2027) and Notes for an Ending (Red Hen Press, forthcoming in spring 2028). Her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in journals including Brooklyn Review, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, and swamp pink. She holds a B.A. from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA from Cornell University. She works for a nonprofit organization and lives in Brooklyn, New York.