2021 Button Poetry Short Form Poetry Contest Winner

Topaz Winters' third poetry collection spans three countries & three generations. In a far-reaching & deftly woven series of ars poeticas, Winters questions the boundary between the things we inherit & those we owe. Topaz arrives at the grave of the American dream, & unspools the enormous grace & guilt of being loved.

So, Stranger stands as a fixed mark between the shifting histories & futures of being a daughter, being an artist, & being an immigrant. If its reader begins as a stranger, they end as part of a lineage: one both of grief & glory, of distance & arrival.