Ina Cariño

2022 Winner in
Poetry

Ina Cariño holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Guernica, Diode, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. Ina is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Ina was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, they founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community.

Photo Credit:
Beowulf Sheehan
Reviews & Praise

"I love the vividness of these poems, the language of the senses that's so alive on each page of FEAST. But these poems aren't just beautiful, sensual lyrics. There is more at stake here. Cariño is a kind of poet who claims family and identity with style that's akin to spell-making . . . . Here, we are in presence of something special, I think. Bravo.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Selected Works

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From the Selection Committee

The title of Ina Cariño’s debut poetry collection is Feast, and it is both evocation and instruction. Rich with ravishing imagery of flesh, sustenance, blood, rites of passage, and the ache of memory, these multilingual poems are both caressing and defiant. She reminds us that what tethers can also sever. Her work thrums with an ancient power like spells, or food-memories, placing the reader in a fever dream of observation and sensation.

Outside Links
“when I say hello to the oldest apples” (Guernica)
“Perishable” (Poetry Northwest)
“To the Boy Who Walks Backwards Everywhere He Goes” (Zoeglossia)
“Infinitives” and “Milk” (Underblong)